A lot of you know that I traveled to France to teach again a couple of weeks ago.
There are few things as illuminating and connecting as travel.
I say that as a complete homebody who always gets home sick after the first week and a half of being gone, no matter the beautiful friends, the beautiful locations and the beautiful things that I am seeing and learning from.
The lightening of the heavy load of living in the usa happened for me not when I stepped foot at my destination, but instead when I hadn’t yet arrived, walking to my connecting flight in the airport in Amsterdam.
I saw families and folks of all sizes and ages, colors and beings, smiling, helping one another.
Toddlers breaking down after traveling like they all do, grandmothers and grandfathers, friends -just people existing in a beautiful way together.
In my younger years, I was a quite nervous and scared traveler, and so now I make a point of asking if I can help folks whenever I’m in airports.
Often we’re tired and overwhelmed. Often we don’t speak the same language.
Last year on my way home there was a couple struggling to figure out numbers and directions in Charles de Gaulle.
They were from Indonesia and had two small children. The wife knew one word in English, which was “Please?” and she pointed at her ticket.
I took it from there. They missed their connection flight and I directed them to the proper way up to get help with a very little other than pointing and nodding and smiling and saying, “You’ll be OK” over and over again.
Did they understand me? I don’t know, but they eventually got in line where another gentleman from Indonesia happened to have also missed his flight and communicated with them and me. We got them sorted and I went on my way. The gentlemen and I locked eyes and we bowed to each other, a moment of saying it all.
People ask me, “Do you speak French?” Barely. I barely speak French, who knows if it’s really understandable. Words come out, they often aren’t really what I mean, but I find generally just trying translates in every language.
Now that’s not to say that I didn’t get had at the market in Gordes when we bought enough olives that they weighed the size of a nine month old and paid probably triple the price …I slowly realized turning bright red as we walked away… Yet my buddies and I were grateful that I hadn’t spent even more in my translation and comprehension flub this year…
I’ve made true deep friendships in France & with the people that live there.
People I miss when I’m not with them and every so often my mind flutters to the idea of moving there.
Then the reality of my home sickness sets in and I realize I’m where I’m supposed to be.
Where I’m supposed to be isn’t easy. The things that we’re talking about doing amongst our friends, our thoughts and ideas are more suited to living in region 12 of a hunger games novel instead of the United States of America -the fact that I’m even telling you that I took a burner phone with me to France is not advised.
What if I need it again when I return -if I return?
The conversations that I’m having both here at home and abroad, they are both nauseating and enlightening & I’m having these talks with people that do not believe in conspiracies. We are simply watching the news.
The deep state has become a real thing. Why just in North Carolina -they- have been doing everything they can to steal the seat from a duly elected judge because -they- didn’t like the outcome and my friends, it made it all the way to the federal courts.
In what world do we live when the votes that are counted or not allowed to stand?
I think that, …but I also remember what happened to Gore when I was a freshman in college and it felt like a subtle tilt.
Being keen of mind and understanding I’ve never quite seen it tilt back towards the reality of a democracy.
I would love to give you just the beautiful golden light that glints across France.
I would love to tell you that my heart is still soaring, and these things are true, but while there, every time I’d open up any kind of social media or any kind of news the reality of what’s happening here in the home of the no-longer-quite-as-free sunk like a big lead weight to the soft deepness of my belly.
I remember the first time Trump got elected, and my daddy asked me what I was so scared of-
-this.
I think now I was scared of all of this that has come to pass, that is passing, that is happening.
Am I to remain silent? Pretend it’s not real? Dance joyously with my beautiful friends in France while in North Carolina all of our rights are being pushed to the test of their limits and many are being eroded? No, that’s not who I am.
Who I am is going to tell you one side is changing rules and anything not with them is becoming classified as “suspected terrorist activity.”
For you
During the week, Monday through Friday, I pick up my kid looking like a street lady. —I’m not really sure what the “appropriate word” is I mean: -street, bag, unhomed, mentally questionable “lady”.
I wear jeans that cost me too much 3 years ago, but have such deep chub rub rips in the thighs they look like unfortunate chaps -or- like I just don’t have 2 cents to rub together to purchase something that covers my back legs and inner flubby bits more appropriately.
Truthfully? They are comfortable around my middle and cover my downstairs & they are cropped, unavailable for dew to grab on during early morning compost walks, or short enough not to bear me down into the slower pace than I’m already moving.
Flash on
I wish men went through perimenopause, now give me a minute, I don’t mean for punishment, I mean for the part of their souls that stopped giving a good god’s fuck about being wanted.
On Sunday I can be wearing a girdle, sucked in and halfway to wanted
and on Monday I’m back to my chub rub chaps not giving one iota when women look at me at drop off like: Um, she’s the one known for her fashion inspirational body positivity practices?
Yeah, it me.
I’m listening to the song “skinny love” on repeat whilst writing to you. “Come on skinny love just last the year…I told you to be patient and I told you to be kind, I told you to be balanced, I told you to be fine… Come on skinny love what happened here?” Damn good question.
The answer is perimenopause.
But really.
If we didn’t care half as much about the gentle spread of our bodies but more about moving into the grace of the dance for just us, yeah
yeah, the hot flashes would still wake us up, I hear you.
But what if? What if the pause and the sweaty heat and the discomfort were bringing us to a different place?
What if that place was for us alone?
What you do is subversive
-words said to me by one of the more brilliant minds I’ve ever personally learned from.
You say, what if it’s just for you, what you wear and how you make it? What if you meant to walk the slowest path of whittling on how it worked & looked & felt just for yourself?
Yeah I mean that. Every way.
It’s not the words alone the song on repeat has me listening to. It’s the piano. Listen to whoever plays that song like they are playing for the lost skinny love of them. Listen. I’m listening to the lost lilt of me. What does the “just for me” want?
It’s not tighter. I’ll tell you that.
It’s not pretending we’re not in a time of crisis, it’s not in keeping quiet in order to not be seen as a problem - It’s not in becoming smaller, narrower, stretching into more discomfort in order to be palatable, let’s remind each other of that.
And let’s mean it, keep the fire, be the mamas that hold the ground for each other’s tears, let’s keep on doing that.
Death is the race we all have to run
My moma was a hospice nurse;
she was an energy healer before that was an ok thing.
I had nightmares as a girl, what if they come for you? What if they burn you and I hide again? That’s what I thought as a girl. Again.
Yeah that woman was a death doula before being a death doula was an idea.
And I went with her sometimes. She was a single mother, and sometimes, the dying were dying after her hours and she knew what to do & how to be that wasn’t just recording numbers.
And I want to say to you, death is not easy for the dying, just like birthing isn’t easy for those doing the being born.
I can remember the waiting, like some mamas wait out those last weeks, the longest of their lives.
I can remember the dying waiting. And the twilight of the in-between. Running while mostly not here for a place none of us could see. And it was work.
“You’re doing a good job. You’re almost done.”
-words my moma said to many.
Words I hope to say to the woman who irritates me more than poison ivy and who I’d be lost without.
“I wish I didn’t annoy you so much” -she said to me this mother’s day.
I didn’t say back, if you didn’t annoy me so, I don’t know how I’d deal with how much I love you.
It’s not that way for most women I know. They didn’t get the mamas they needed. And it’s a heavy cross to bear.
But I know something, chub rub hanging, life messy, being looked at like I’m a loon in the grocery store whilst singing loudly to my kid (a kid I’m only 1/3 good for honestly), we’re all here with the white hot cash goodness of being able to mama each other.
We can be the lost mamas to each other. It’s a reconfiguring of pain. It’s a reckoning of the lost boys.
We’re all in the band of lost boys, including me & my moma. There were years she wasn’t there because she couldn’t be. And there were years her mama wasn’t there because she couldn’t be.
And that’s the truth of life, and it's ok. The sooner we reach the shores of that reckoning, the better we’ll all be in accepting the tidal wave that ushers in the village life. We need more than one mama.
Beginning brings the end
Since a girl, the one thing my moma gave me that she would have been told she shouldn’t have -was the truth of what I’ve always carried, No matter whether or not we’re prepared or ready, death is the race we all have to run.
I’ve seen the heartbreak more than the daybreak. I’ve held the loss more than the birth, I came in seeing the leaving and I want you to know, we don’t get out of having to run one race. Heart pounding to the glorious and sometimes bitter end, we’re still out of breath and aching to reach the final line, a bag of bones if we’re lucky, and a shattering if we’re ripped into a sprint.
I’m here to tell you we all run it, however it looks.
At the reckoning let us be able to say -we left it all on the field.
The I love yous, the -I’m so mad at you because I love you.
The -I gave it everything I had and I meant it all because I love you
and you is you.
You.
I love you.
I stopped noticing how your jeans were ripped and your heart was hankering to be better
it was good enough.
I wrecked my car on the cliff of your leap.
I busted my heart on the way you sang it out.
I believed you were worth it.
You.
You.
For you, I left it all on the field.
that’s what I have to say to you after going to France with women that mean more to me than I can tell you.
With women that stayed home that mean that too.
I want you to be all those messy ways, and sunday ways, and monday mornings-
I come back sad. Because I come back having left it all on the field.
Lucky to be a human that gets to live so many lives in this one
lucky to be able to leave it all again
and again.
You leave it all out there for you too?
Please
These days I drink an elixer of Big Hug made by my local herbal elixer mama, Helibron herbs. It has motherwort and rose in it, almost like we never get enough mama-ing.
This made me shed tears from my heart. Thank you. «The white hot cash goodness of being able to mama each other». All the love.
Gorgeous, thank you.