mother belly fire Mother, I need to talk to you. I feel that I need your perspective as a woman. I feel that I need to relate to you and how you've felt inside your body over the last 55 years. I feel that maybe you could have some answers for me; something to offer, at least. I feel that there is an emptiness that comes from being objectified, a loneliness that comes from being a completely different sexual being from a man. I feel that you can totally love a man and still feel completely misunderstood by him. I feel that you might relate. Have you been trapped by your own desire to please someone, Mother? Have you felt like a vessel? 040604 ... magpie said yesterday "you've never been on a vacation" i know i said "i could hitchhike to nova scotia" 040604 ... oldephebe god that was so honest, so beautiful 040605 ... kerry we pulled into the driveway and i was about to cry and didn't really know the reason. she seemed okay, used to picking up after us, ignoring our occasional rude comments. i looked at the plastic grocery bag sweating on the floor of the car, stuck to the sides of the milk that it held. i picked up the bag myself, heavy as it was, surprised that i hadn't waited and hoped for someone else to do it first as i normally would. i got out of the car, elbow folding inward and outward with the weight of the bag slinging me off-kilter. she looked at me as she came around the front of the car. "want me to carry that?" "no." she is my mother; why wouldnt i do these things for her? 040609 ... nom i don't want her to feel bad 060120 ... nom oh mother dear i cannot tell 070325 ... nom said maybe he's yet to fall madly in love with me but that if he doesn't someone will 070422 ... nom i told her yesterday i was sad and that i couldn't eat i never tell her i'm sad or that i can't eat 070422 ... Isaou Mother doesn't understand this teenage world I live in 070604 ... le leche league were you breast fed? 080116 ... margaux should i trust the government? 080117 ... cocoon it makes me sad that whenever i talk to you these days 1. i have to mentally prepare myself for the phone call 2. i want the phone call to be over as soon as possible 3. when its done, i feel depressed/stressed/angry/like crying. i never thought i would feel this way 090720 ... raze i thought i saw you in a restaurant. dyed red hair. green sweater. it was awkward before it became anything. then i realized it wasn't you, as suddenly as i'd thought it was. relief isn't a big enough word. you wouldn't be eating out with friends like that woman was anyway. you don't have any friends. only people who buy the lies you sell them out of politeness or indifference or shared symptoms of a common disease. 131028 ... epitome of incomprehensibility My parents were sitting on the couch. I had been wasting time sitting on my bed and picking up a random book about Montreal history, looking through the chapter that one of Dad's colleagues had written. We were talking about her briefly - they were trying to remember her last name - and Dad mentioned something about her moving to this city with her husband. Mom: I thought she wasn't married. Did he die? Dad: No...he went off to live with his boyfriend. Me, from the floor, giving the dog a belly rub: Well, that's not fair. Mom: It's *sick.* Me: It wasn't fair, him being married. But what does "sick" have to do with it? Mom: It's sick. I can't sympathize with her when she's like this. I understand she had a strict upbringing, that her own mother frowned on her supposed deviations from normality (worry that she had a learning disability because of bad high school grades, though she graduated university magna cum laude). I feel bad for her arthritis, her past depression, her current bouts of sleeplessness. But if she has stupid prejudices, why doesn't she keep them in her own stupid head? I sound like a child. Say the roles were reversed. If that man had been married to his husband and then ran off with a woman, say the Canadian historian. What would Mom think of that? Sick? Healthy? What's the opposite of sick? Take the literal meanings: being "sick" is not fun, but sickness is morally neutral. Health is morally neutral. Fair is good and unfair is bad. I may sound like a fucking child but at least I have a functioning moral compass. I am not going to yell at her for something that isn't (directly) against me. That wouldn't be fair either. 230318 ... epitome of incomprehensibility For the past few days, secondhand_stress and pressing expectations kept me from writing here, or rather worried me to the point of not having the energy to. It was my mother I was mostly worried about since she didn't seem like herself and she was having trouble coordinating things. I can't quite explain it. Not just manual dexterity but things that involved remembering multiple steps. Thankfully, not a lot of Alzheimer's in that side of the family, but it's not like these things can't pop up anyway. But then she seemed otherwise normal, except that she was tired and worried too much about getting to places on time. Like her sense of time and numbers was out of whack. And this came on pretty suddenly. So I worried about sudden, life-threatening things like pressure on the brain, unseen bleeding...and maybe the aftermath of a stroke, since what do I know about strokes? Silly to apply my simplistic first-aid knowledge as if I did (see the wordy "kinetically"). Or a tumour targeting a certain area. Aftermath of a concussion. I don't know what. I had to play piano at Livingstone again. Again, not that well; I can't sight-read four-part harmony, and one tune I just didn't know. Even then, I didn't feel a great stab of anger, only a dart of embarrassment, but neither was there a compensatory sense of triumph. And I was a little confused that Mom wouldn't play, because I'd heard her practicing the day before and she sounded fine, if a little slow. Later yesterday I persuaded her to walk the dog with me. She had been searching for a lost medication and Dad at last decided he'd see if he could get more at the drugstore. The decision to walk seemed like a triumph after she hadn't wanted to do anything, even though we did the short version and her joints ached. The day before, when Dad shared his continuing concerns about Mom's health with Y. and me, my brother worried that her depression was back. I didn't quite see how that was connected. But it seems it was, sort of. She still needs the results of a CT scan (what is that, computed topography? no, "tomography" is the word) but she seems to be getting back to normal. The issue was probably that she got off-track with her medication schedule (maybe as a result of the tiredness from the antibiotics) and lost a vial with the lithium tablets in particular. The lithium is an antidepressant. (Sparky must be very peppy, then, with his heavy lithium battery behind his puppy eyes. To be clear, this is the car, not the dog.) And I worry: why does she still need an antidepressant? I'm not saying she shouldn't have it, because NOT having it was clearly worse for her than not being on schedule with the arthritis meds, but it's discouraging that a depression pressed down on someone eight years ago still leaves a mark. Our bodies are complicated machines, complicated beasts. 251208 what's it to you? who go blather from