An incredible moment and mundane. Should I publish it or keep it as a draft until tomorrow when I can reread and edit, make it flow?
My husband and I have just been out to a bar for a beer, listening to our jukebox picks (Foreigner, Stevie Ray Vaughn, ZZ Top) mingled with karaoke singing. One of the singers, Gladys, a lady of about sixty or so, warbling Patsy Clinish type songs. The real personal ones about how I made the mistake of my life by thinking you don’t matter and IF I had you here, how I would treat you (treat you ) right and believe… again. (God, I love that shit. God I hate that shit.) Gladys was cool. She was off-key in spots but she reminded me of my grandma, singing in church, when I was about six years old. Grandma would sing out the hymns in that unbidden vibrato that comes in later years and at that time I didn’t understand how a physical faculty could be beyond one’s control. ”Why doesn’t she smooth it out? It doesn’t need to waver so much.” I liked the sound of young, strong voices, then. I didn’t understand that things that come naturally, easily for twenty year olds come out differently when time grips the vocal chords and forces the sound through its own filter. The tone sounds naked and vulnerable.
9:45 pm – We have to get back home. The children are expected soon. The youngest out swimming at a friend’s house. The oldest at an end of year party/ farewell for the assisatant band director who’s position was cut due to budget considerations.
My son, sixteen, so much promise, so much ahead of him. He knows it, senses his power. In a way, like me, when I was his age, but hopefully posessing a stability that I didn’t know, something I struggle with long after that “peak” time.
My daughter, twelve, also feeling her strength but still needing her Momma. And I, so thankful that somehow I am able to fill that role. My role models gleaned from so many fractional places. Anywhere. Just show me how to nurture. And not destroy.
So here we all are, in the kitchen, after our evenings out. (This is where I stopped last Friday night.)
Now, Monday morning, I return to the draft and don’t even remember what was so urgent that I left that moment with my family to sit alone at the computer to get down into words.
I could do the Kahlil Gibran thing:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you…
etc. etc. But I don’t think that’s where I was headed. That we don’t own, in any way, the life we help create, is an old theme for me, not a revelation.
Oh well, the enlightenment has passed. I write this in hopes that it has the same effect as writing down dreams in the morning, at least the little bit I remember. I didn’t remember anything I dreamed until I started consciously working to bring my dreams to the surface when I woke up. It’s been a slow process but bits and pieces now come spontaneously on waking. Making the effort to write them down is a commitment, an act of faith that more will come. So I am also trying to summon other instances of intuition or flashes of knowing that so often get forgotten.
