eaglesnest

I sent out an e-mail tonight — a few close palsy walsy, giving the link to this here rambly blog. For some it will be surprising to read the details of my journey, for others just a new insight into our regular chats. I did NOT e-mail relatives with the link.

There was one address I desperately wished I could type into the BCC field. But mail to the great DonKey would bounce-a-rounce-a-roo. Tears began to well in my very tired eyes. The one person in my entire life who I care about being proud of me & where I am going is no more.

I keep his addy in my address book as one might keep a postcard from some vacation, a memento to pretend it was just yesterday. I wish it were just yesterday. I could shoot out words across the Cloud and he’d be there; with creaky knees, stiff fingers, the Dovers next door, good ol Bill, et-f***in’-cetera.

He’d know me from anyone, he’d be witty, clever, biting and he’d adore me. He’d give me the no-strings attached, unconditional, all powerful parental love & more, so much beyond more, that I never evah had from anyone else in my life. Forget tears, try huge lump in my throat. There is nothing left but the words we bounced between us — his; somewhere within reach are the ol’ Bill tales, the Willits letters, the others stuff from my youthful days & mine; the tangerine poem, the math allusions & metaphors, the letters in a folder in an old e-mail address. He would have spoken sense to me early, he’d have been quiet & supportive, he’d have been there as parents are supposed to be. As one who loves us would.

He’d have tossed words, stories, poems, e-mails until I caught the drift and learned the lesson.

A newer friend & I have been discussing work & fulfillment and many other parts of the Buddhist notion of Right Living. I just began working again Sunday & he started a new job today. We are both attempting to align what we do for monetary renumeration and what fulfills us spiritually.

For the first decade of my adult life, I did not work outside the home. I was married to a Union electrician & stayed home with 3 children. I grew an organic garden, “farmed” worms, made all natural soap, put up preserves, made pasta from scratch & out of wild greens and tended to the time consuming needs of three little girls and a home. I choose a career that was BOTH in line with my spiritual fulfillment and was selling out, doing anything for money or more precisely to have money w/o the usual requirements of a paying job.

I allowed myself to become a prisoner of my job. When I got divorced, I had no job skills, no work background. I was not in a great spot to be able to care for myself financially. Life’s unusual twists & turns provided me with two ghostwriting gigs & then a move across country to my true home town. {I’m hoping you figured out that was Reston}

I was blessed in a few ways. The condo was my then boyfriend’s parents’ so we didn’t have to fill out anything. I got a job in an amazing way (story later) & things were honky dory. Fast forward from that fall to the next summer when we decided to move back to CA. Apartment hunting was determined by our dog’s acceptance. I was the co-applicant, but J had the real job & paycheck. All was well. Fast forward again, we are no longer together. After the famous train trip & brief respite in Reston, I returned to San Diego. Roommate situation bounced a bit before I landed where I currently am sitting. But, I was only a roommate, never a renter candidate.

Fast forward to NOW — oh hell’s bells. I haven’t been “working” in oh a year or so. Not “real work”. There are no W2s, no steady checks shown in my bank account balance. NADA ZILCH ZIPPO I am back where I was over a decade ago when I was divorced and career-wise a nothing.

Funny thing (ironic AND haha) I have secured employments, enough of them in fact to make a VERY pretty penny.

• Problem 1 — the main income won’t begin till mid-July (full time nanny gig again - do what you do well, plus it works with the Right Living - I help a child be happy & healthy etc).
  
• Problem 2 - almost all the other work is freelance or commissioned work and therefore no W2s.
  
• Problem 3 - last month’s bank statement shows worse then ZERO. My son’s father did not work at all & we lived off cash form his tips & my stuff here & there.
  

So, if I fill out a renter application, they will reject me right out as I can not show any steady income over he past 6 months. Sah-qurew me. If I were to have until August 1st, I would have pay stubs, bank account records etc to satisfy the income requirements, then some. We NEED to be in a place June 1st for Mama C & lil K.

Due to taxes & stimulus checks & timing of other financings, I do/will have in hand enough for deposit and up to 2 months of rent. If we can work with a home owner who will see where I am and why I am there, I can pay those 2 months plus to walk in the door.

Some wonderful person will see two single mothers working as hard as possible to create a good life for their sons, and understand why I am monetarily at a loss for the moment & ONLY the moment, we will be good. We have to be good with someone.

There WILL be a homeowner who was raised by a single mother and he will accept us in her honour. It will come to pass in a house with a yard and we will be safe & happy.

The balance will be found.

More sidestepping along the path to our new life — actually, now that I type it out I realize it’s not a side anything.

Today was a BIG day - we went to see properties.

Why I called this a sidestep was I am ahead of my narrative here, but today was monumental.

To jump ahead and then bring it on back, I need to ’splain Luucy that I am going to be co-habiting co-familing with another single mother. There is this site, Co-Abode , that helps mamas find mamas to house share. Wonderful Mama C & her impish lil dude K are our other halves, amazingly brought together thru the magic of the internet.

I was going to get around to all the details of creating my new life & my new community & my new family, in a nice well thought out manner. {inside tidbit - I am an editor.}

But as I mentioned recently, seems there are stops I didn’t plan for in my journey as I attempt to write it all down.

So, my tiny nucleus core of daughter, son & self have been trying to be compatible with another nucleus core {by the by, I am soo sure my science is off & my science geeky guys would be rolling their eyes at me} composed of C&K. We went over to their current residence last night & made a short list of recent Craig’s List rentals that are within our two modest budgets & she was to arrange what she coul dfor today. I work Sunday mornings from 7:45 am till 1 pm and she goes to work Sundays before 4 pm. We have a louvered window of time to see one or two rentals.

We are dealing with a 4 year old & a 5 1/2 year old who are just getting to know each other & while they adore each other {mine calls hers his “little brother”, hers said today “I like your sister, I wish she were mine.”}.

We are having a heat wave today & at my work {where my son was with me} the AC was not only broken, the heat was on. The boys are hot & cranky.

They both went to bed late, mine had to get up early for work. We are running around with them in a car instead of being able to let hem play. We go to an apartment complex first.

Now, take any kid - pink or blue - and open the door of an empty space - house, apartment, office, warehouse - and, well, gee whiz Molly, if they aren’t gonna wanna run like squirrels throughout the whole damned place.

No matter, we weren’t trying to impress Mr. Blue shirt & nice haircut. We were, however, trying to get thru all of this with our sanity intact. Maybe, I am an older mama, maybe I am so damned ballsy, whatever, but I don’t give a flying f^$* if you think you can be judgmental about my kiddo’s “behaviour.” Mama C, on the other hand, is getting nervous about Lil K’s reactions & actions of late.

This isn’t my topic though, nor am I going to analyze Mama C & K right now. What I want to write about, as I take the round-abouts & Restonian “short-cuts” & my sweet a$$ time to get around to is the second address.

We drive down the little side-street of a community of cul-de-sac clusters of townhouses, reminiscent of certain Reston neighborhoods to me. (I will write y’all at least one blog explaining what the Reston stuff is about, esp since they are more of late}

The one we are here to see is the first on the cul-D. Immediately we are both won over by the shady tree in the front yard. There is a fenced back yard of concrete that would serve the golden dragon well. Beyond the back yard is a little common area of green, trees & a park bench, all visible from the plentiful kitchen windows.

Mama C takes tour #1 while Mama Kia keeps the boys in their car seats, all 4 doors open and toy cars well distributed. I open the front screen and stand inside. The very Brady-esque stairs leading to the upper level get my attention, as does the very dark carpeting. Usually that would not be a 1st choice, but c’mon, boys & a dog & dark carpet = good fit.

Upstairs, more Brady-era touches. The two smaller bedrooms have double doors connecting them, allowing for one big massive room if opened. The bathrooms are a riot, but do-able, as there are 2 1/2. Again though, these are not my point tonight.

When I was outside waiting to see the house, I ate a Farmers’ Market cherry. I do NOT like cherries period. I walked down the middle of the very neighborhoody, very serene, family feeling, peaceful cul D. I turned back to the car & house, said a prayer to Lakshmi

As I finished my gratitudes to Lakshmi, a brilliant thought popped in my mind. I would give an offering. So, I took one of the last cherries from Lil K & I ate the flesh. I pulled up a little earth from the east side of the tree’s base, I pushed the cherry stone in, covered it with leaves & invoked Lakshmi’s blessings on us to find the right house.

It was then, that we get to my nugget of importance.

Yes, it involved near tears. I was standing in this spot, I was painfully aware of how close I was to living in a house again, of providing my son with a real life, of being some level of normal. I wanted to hug the tree, cry thankful tears on its rough bark, hug the man who owns the house for the reality of the beginning of our physical search for our new home.

My son had already intoroduced hismelf with a hand shake upstairs. When we were loading them back up, he thanked the man with another hand shake. I can see him shaking whoever’s hands we finally do rent from with a sincere thanks for the oportunity of a new life.

My intention was to write today about the brain tumor & originally about the C word - Caring as it related to L.

Then today happened. Today was a baby shower, followed by a meet & greet w/ a new family in regards to employment, then another get together with our new friends/family in order to formalize a concrete plan for the BIG MOVE.

How do I care about thee -

lemme count the friggin ways —

I serve as food prep/childcare/”hostess” etc
@ your fami-dam-ily function
whilst your mil* slings the barbed commentary
in my general direction.

I will wake my own child early,
come to your house & your child,
mother him with my son,
for $12 an hour.

I will create a co-family,
co-single mama parent our pack of wild puppy boys,
patchwork cobble multiple gigs
packing over 30 hours into a day
to give us all a better life.

I edged my soul to the brink of insanity& despair,
battling over every ounce of sustenance,
insisting you revel in the miracles,
only to retreat from the rubble of your mind,
scarred & wary, distrustful of caring again.

*mil = mother in law

Seems my itinerary had some layovers I didn’t schedule.

Sidetracking on a tangential train of thought — I watched Juno last night, alone, while I designed a baby shower gift. It affected me enough that I logged on to my on-line mama community to locate whatever discussion about the movie I had missed. I didn’t search our database far enough back in time & was bewildered to not find quite the flaming thread.

The women who are part of this community live in various walks of life, in many states & provinces, and even overseas. They are single mamas , coupled mamas, married mamas, divorced mamas, gay mamas, yo mamas. They are mamas who have had abortions, who are adopted, who are adopting , who are birth mothers with contact to the adoptive families of their children & who are in contact with the birth mamas of children they have/are adopting.

These women make me proud on a high frequency — proud of how they mother, proud to be part of their circle of friends & family, and proud of the next generation as is being raised by these women.

These women surely have wonderful thoughts & issues about this movie & its treatment of teen pregnancy & adoption. And I wanted them all awake & engaged in it with me at 2 a.m. pdt.

I had to settle for writing a little “placeholder” of thoughts and go to bed. When I got up this morning, one mama had kindly linked me to the months old thread. I had enough time in my hectic day {of last minute prep for the baby shower I am co-hostessing tomorrow for a young irl mama friend who is having her second child in 5 weeks} to read thru most of it.

Because we are sisters, I talk to some of these mamas on a regular, if not daily basis, so I was able to discuss the movie, the characters, the quick basics briefly before running out to “use too much of the daylight” as my son said. It was good for the moment to voice some thoughts & hear others, to begin processing. Yet, I am still unsettled.

Having been born to a teen mother who had a very very different environment & decision making process than Juno gives me one perspective to the movie & its topic. Being a mother to 3 teen daughters adds some other unusual prism angles to my pov.

Plus, I had been introspective and delving into some serious issues in my life that were brought about due to having had a teen mother who was pressured into marrying an abusive man just before I watched Juno. To admit to crying during the movie is forgone. To say I was disturbed is an underwhelm, as DK says.

I tried to talk to my nearly 18 year old daughter about the movie. She had seen it before & was desperate to see it again. I asked her today, why or what she liked about it.

I will broach topics,  feel her out for how far we need to talk shit out. Mostly, I find she is not emotionally mature enough to handle some heavy duty talks. Having attempted before, at great length, to do so over some touchy topics between us — she is Pro-Life to a fault & I am Pro-Choice - I pretty much know when not to exert myself too much.

I was still vulnerable from the things I thought about last night (per previous blog) and when she gave a standard teen answer “it was funny,” I only took one more step to discussion. The reply - “I was glad, of course, she didn’t get an abortion.”  No mother/daughter dialogue today.

PSHEW!!!

 After not much of anything about it, I am not far from where I stood last night as I turned off the lights & went to stand, thinking, beneath the hot shower.

At least, I am not crying tonight.

As a toddler, I called my mother by her first name, L, & created interferences (I would wake my baby sister up) to prevent my mother from being beaten by her first husband. From the tender age of 2 or 3, I looked out for her much more than she looked out for me. Instead of leaving an abusive man to protect the two of us, L “schemed” to get pregnant again.

“Then someone would need me to take care of them. That would be enough of a reason to leave him.”

That was 36 years ago. My little sister is currently pregnant with her second child, a daughter and has a 14-month-old son. Many things L did messed my sister up enough that she had to allow herself to be fired from her “very important corporate career” before she’d allow herself to de-stress enough to get pregnant. There is much more to that story, too. However, I am not my sister & this is not her story. Her life is only pertinent when it affects mine.

Then again, her very existence affects every aspect of my life.

As L’s child, I was not important, not needy enough; not dependent on her for her to make the important steps to leave abuse. I was not enough.

Until today, I have couched this little gem of a family story in as much “positive” spin as I could to stomach it, to not let it get under my skin, itch up into my eyes, twist my guts about like a macramé plant holder. I tried to create a sense of self-sufficiency, self-dependency. “See? I was so self- assured I didn’t need anyone to take care of me, to look out for my best interests.”

Forget that I was only 3 and she was supposed to be mothering me. Her lack of self-esteem & confidence AND more importantly self-worth were so overpowering and I was so mature, so “independent” that she NEVER mothered me. I had to be my mother, her mother, and later my sister & my brother’s mother.

As I said, until today, I didn’t allow myself to accept that what she was saying with her actions and later her words — she told us these things, like you might tell her girlfriends over margaritas, when we were very young — was that I was not important enough.

Nevertheless, somewhere, some how I internalized that fact and it has not only coloured my relationship with L and my sister but with the men in my life, as well. I allowed myself to struggle through a decade of emotional abuse & neglect in order to provide my daughters a good life, and in order to NOT be L & end up divorced. I put the emotional needs of my son’s father ahead of my emotional needs for almost another ten years, in order to NOT be L & leave another man when my oldest daughter was preparing to leave the nest.

Here I am — divorced from the father of my daughters, as was L {well, my sister’s father anyway} and about to take my son away from his father when my oldest child enters adulthood as L had done when I got married at 20 and she packed up my sister & brother and divorced her 2nd husband.

The difference is I waited until my daughter no longer needed me to provide a support structure and so I would not yank her out of her senior year and move her around. L did that to my sister — she moved away during my sister’s last year of high school. My sister retaliated by moving in with a friend’s family. Moreover, just to be crystal clear, L did not wait until I married because I no longer needed her; she waited because then I was no longer there to take care of her, & my siblings.

I was not going to be her mother anymore.

I was about to have my own children.

There were times I did in fact mother L again, of course.

There was the next boyfriend, who was abusive physically, emotionally and who abused drugs & alcohol. There was the “big fight” they had that involved the police. I had to sit her down and explain that there was no excuse EVER for a man to hit a woman. NEVER.

L moved back in with her parents for a few weeks. I was 25 and she was 42. I was very angry off because I did not, never had, never would have parents, Mom & Dad, to run home to if I ever needed.

There was the brain tumor.

Being a mother for me is about much more than my children. I am a mothering soul. It is evident in my work as a nanny, a doula, the founder of an NPO to make life better for children displaced by Hurricane Katrina, in my friendships. There are many reasons I am called Mama Kia, beyond the title of Reverend, which I use so rarely.

I am painfully aware of how I have allowed my mothering of my son’s father to keep us here. He has many issues that I address and attempt to heal by mother love. He has immense abandonment issues, and some of these are tied into the loss of his other children by vindictive, money-grubbing ex wives.

So, in an effort to spare him more pain, and in a blindness of mothering I stayed too long in an unhealthy relationship, I took care too long of someone who I am not responsible for, I allowed myself to be damaged.

Somewhere I lost the hard fought lesson about boundaries I had set and preserved at all costs about 7 years ago when I finally walked away from mothering my own mother and allowing her toxicity to endanger my soul.

Before considering serious planning to move my little family, I had a lot of clearing away of emotional & mental debris. I knew that I could not just GO. There were steps to getting ready to prepare. I know it sounds like excuses & stalling techniques, but it really was necessary.

Having already gotten divorced after a 10 year marriage & then dealing with the devastating break-up of the beautiful relationship I managed to be blessed with after that, I was looking at a huge pile of emotional baggage that had only kept me in this current non-relationship far longer than was right.

Adding a child to the mix was both a heavy factor in my need to leave and a detractor to actualizing the action of leaving. Many months, year plus of months, of only co-parenting with the man who I was not involved with in any relationship beyond being our son’s parents was taking a toll. Reminders of how it had been with my fax really pushed me over the edge. I had eventually forced the cards in that strained, miserable co-parenting co-habiting farce. I knew I needed to do that again. I wanted it to go better this time.

This past fall, after many years of being in an un-fulfilling, unhappy, emotionally devoid relationship with my son’s father, I began the process of preparing to fly the coop.

Almost a decade ago, my ten year marriage to the father of my three now teen daughters reached critical and after many lies & manipulations by my fax (f***ing @$$ ex) I ended up not only single, but without my children on a 24/7 basis. That was an adventure & experience that I am certain will be reflected upon at some point in this new journey.

The differences this time are immense. When I leave I will be taking my precocious un-schooled 5 1/2 year old son, my 17 year old daughter, who is teetering on the brink of adulthood & college, and our almost 1 year old barky Labrador puppy. I will have to provide for a family. They will depend on me more than anyone ever has before. AND that is a lot considering everything I have done in the past to care for not only my four children, but also my mother during her cancer treatments.

But this will be the first time I will be the primary financial provider for a family, while having to care for one of my children (vs. them being in school full-time or in utero). Granted, I was the sole paycheck during my pregnancy with my son while his father sat things out career-wise. At any time then, all I had to do was tell him I wanted him to work and he would have, could have. I did not have to shoulder it all, I choose to.

This time, I choose to fly solo.