Delicately Intertwined

I think of you 

from the time I awake and 

off and on 

if I allow 

my mind to wander.  

Our meeting and parting 

is a tangible expression of what I know and feel  I have always known about you and me, 

something more than my body, 

more than your body,  

something more than my words, 

more than your words.

It is a feeling and it is a thought 

and it is more and less than both.  

And sometimes it is neither and only feels like a memory. 

 It is more powerful than the human expression of love and it is not lust, 
but it is like something of both.  

I try to put into words and I find it impossible.  

I only know that there is something that is the very essence of what is me 

that feels that something that is the very essence of you 

is delicately intertwined.

I hope you can understand:  

I have known you and will always know you despite what events happen in this lifetime.  

An Impromptu Conversation While Reaching for a Package of Always Infinity: A Reflection on Womanhood and Our Periods

How lucky are we to be born women.... We uniquely have the ability to carry forth life, a blessing that begins that first time we bleed.  Our life revolves around that cycle and yet most of our discussions are in private and hushed.  Women endure humiliation, shame, teasing, ridicule because of our cycle.  Proof of my own embarrassment is in how often as a young woman I tried to covertly place my tampons on the conveyor at a grocery store or made a split second decision in the feminine product aisle just to get the hell out as quickly as possible.  No one wants to have an impromptu conversation with an acquaintance while reaching for a package of Always Infinity.

I remember when I first got my period.  It was the fall of 6th grade and I was at the Collette's house sitting with Gramps while the rest of his family milked the cows.  When they came in, I rushed across the road to my house in the dark and promptly told my mother.  If I close my eyes and breath deeply, I can remember the warm September night air pressing in around me and the sound of crickets.  The starry night and the open field. I was altogether embarrassed and wanted to keep it a top secret.  My mother had other plans and announced that she needed to go to the store to get me pads.  She came home with Always extra longs as well as ice cream from Greg and Molly's store.  To celebrate, she said.

 Looking back, many memorable moments are because of my period.  We've all been there.  White pants and our period.  Enough said, right?  I even remember the first time my grandmother suggested I wear a tampon.  She tried explaining how to insert it, and I was sick thinking about how I would put that "thing" in where I peed. I didn't realize I had more parts "down there." 

I never understood why my Mom wanted to celebrate that moment.  I couldn't--until I lost the privilege of having a period long before I expected it would happen to me.

It's peculiar to me that I have held onto my feelings about going through premature menopause for so long.  I guess by writing about it, it makes it real.  When I was 35 years old, I began working out and eating healthy.  I stopped having my period about the same time, and my gynecologist attributed my new active lifestyle to the loss of my monthly "friend."  Although I had no intention of having any more children, I didn't realize how heartbroken I would be when the choice was taken away from me. I learned that I was definitely perimenopausal at 36 when my endocrinologist was doing bloodwork after my thyroid cancer.  She was very matter of fact and said that my FSH levels indicated that I was in the early stages of menopause.  My brain was still processing the effects of having cancer and I had to set the fact that I was entering this last stage of womanhood aside. 

But I had indicators before that day in which I guessed I would never again conceive.  When I felt my gynecologist of many years was not taking me seriously, I switched doctors.  He felt that what I needed to do was "freeze" my uterus.  In fact, the question he asked me was, "Do you think you want to have more children?"  I replied, "I don't, but I certainly don't want the option taken from me."  He told me with the pain that I was having (which he felt was most likely endemetriosis) it would be my best option.  It was the fall and school was in full swing and I was enduring Common Core (and not very gracefully) so I set aside the idea to come back to it later, which I tend to do with all important decisions in my life.

I came back to it before I anticipated when my ex-husband told me he and his wife were pregnant. I watched as my daughters' excitement spilled out as the babbled about their new baby brother or sister.  I pasted the smiles each time they spoke of the new little one.  When they found out it was a girl, we went out together and bought her some small gifts. When she was born and they wanted me to see the photos of her, I oohed and ahhhed on cue.  And all the time I couldn't help but think, "I'll never be able to give them this joy."  Inside, I was wilting.  What did it mean that my body could no longer carry a child?

After I found myself in a relationship with a man whom I adore and want to spend my life, the feelings came up again.  He has three children younger than my own (together we have a 3,5,7,10 and 11 year old).  His ex-wife also became pregnant and I couldn't help but wondering if Brock and I could have a child (despite being blessed with five) would we?  Part of me thinks yes.  I would like to have a child that is ours, one that would be a bond between the two families.  I have tried to stop imagining what that would be like because it's futile thinking, but I can't.  My brain processes information slowly and I come to a place of acceptance only by embracing the feelings that come with each new stage, struggle or success.

 I find myself longing to go back.  I'm no longer the girl and young woman I was once and never will be again.  My body has begun a decline and although I fervently attempt to prolong the inevitable by eating clean and working out, when I begin to think about menopause, I think about the cycle of life, which includes death.  I see my fresh faced daughter who has her cycle and think of the years ahead of her, the pain and joy of being a woman.  Not just the physiology of it, but the exploration and the discovery of her own self, her sexuality and her identity.  I think of the moment in Willa Cather's novel, O Pioneers when Cather describes the "V" formation of the geese.  The ones flying at the helm, eventually get tired, and must go to the back of the flock.  I project myself into the future, knowing that my body will altogether fail, as it has proven many times, and I will make way for the next generation as they take their place where I once was.

And ultimately, I reflect.  I reflect on my own journey, my unaware self falling in and out of love a few times, not understanding who I was and having no idea of what expectations I should have from my relationships.  I think of how as a woman in my 20s, I didn't give myself much of a chance, instead looking for someone to edge me toward happiness... or some material thing to give me a sense of value.  Knowing now that what my Mom said to me as a child was so very true- you have to love yourself before you can really love someone else.  I am working on embracing this new stage of life, the stage where I can pass on the wisdom of age and experience to not only the two daughters that came from my womb, but also to Brock's two daughters, who have become part of my story as well.

  And it is now, as I begin to take the helm from my own mother, that I understand the beauty of the day I began to bleed, and can rejoice in it.

Peace and Blessings,
April

When God Speaks to Me This Is What He Says

My dear child,

I have given you yet another test and you are thinking, why?  Why me?  

Your struggle has been long, and constant.  I have given you few breaths and you've relaxed your weary feet only as little as the time between your challenges has allowed.  

You have wandered through darkness.  I've given you a candle along the way.  In the darkness you have stumbled.  You have fallen.  You have scraped your shins and elbows. You have felt your way along at times on your knees.  You have learned to not just listen, but to hear. To see things in the dark that others do not see.  There have been times you have lost the light and I have relit it for you or I have given you the stars.  

When you have stopped altogether and sat down on the rocky ground, gazing through streaming tears at the endless night I hummed you to sleep with the sound of my waters then woke you up with the wind of my breath on your face.


Do you remember the morning your baby brother returned to me with his wings?  That day I sent your grandfather to you.  I breathed his words.  I spoke through him.  His arm around you was my arm.  His tears were my tears.

Do you remember the day you were teased on the bus and you felt like you just couldn't go another day?  Do you remember running off the bus, straight into the house past your mother and into your room, then broke into sobs?  Do you remember the sound of your mother's voice, so comforting?  Her hand on your back?  Her gentle words were my words.  Her hand was my hand.

Do you remember the shame you felt in junior high when your peers teased you because of your clothes? Do you remember how heavy their words were and how you felt like you would never be good enough?  

Do you remember the years of enduring your father's alcoholism?  The abuse?  The shame of poverty?

 Or in college, when your "friend" attacked you in your sleep and took what makes you a woman without your permission?

When you received news that your father was in critical condition because he was drinking and driving?  Do you remember when you finally told him he could not be a part of your life anymore?  Do you remember the guilt you felt when you said those words?

When you were pregnant with your firstborn and your husband's family would not allow you to share your joy with them because your sister-in-law had suffered a miscarriage?  Do you remember how they pretended you were not pregnant and the one time someone asked you how you were feeling when you were five months and you had no idea how to respond because you had not been allowed to discuss the pregnancy?  

Do you remember after how you almost died in childbirth with your first born and carried the grief of being a new mother?  How you sat up breastfeeding, looking at her, wondering why?  Thinking terrible thoughts and feeling such shame and guilt because of them?

Your car accident when you were six months pregnant with your second born?  How you thought you would die?  Then how I brought you to your knees again four days after her birth and you spent five days in the hospital, aching for your new baby?

When your husband told you he loved you but he was not in love with... then you discovered he loved another?  How you cried every day for a year and hid the tears and pretended?  How you woke up everyday hoping to return to your sleeping because your living was a nightmare?

The shame when you filed for a bankruptcy because you could not pay your bills?

Then I gave you your health and you rejoiced. Then I took it away.  You experienced the physical pain of a ruptured disc and the pinched nerve that never healed and you thought that was the worst it could be.  Your surgery and your helplessness as you felt humiliated, asking for others to care for you?

Then I gave you cancer and you realized that the physical pain you'd experienced was not the worst.  Looking at your daughters and thinking of how you would say the forever goodbye was the worst.

And then, I gave you the death thoughts.   And you realized that it wasn't saying goodbye to your daughters that could be the worst.  It would be watching your daughters from heaven, dying, and not being there with them as they perished.

Then I gave you more three more diseases and the pain of bone and ache of heart at dreams dying and yet you fight still.

My child.  I describe these few moments of your experience because you must know that your ordeal has been one planned.  You are my warrior.  You have risen each time and battled.  

Have you not seen how many times I have sent my wounded to you, for you to comfort them, to extend your wisdom, to embrace them.  To heal.

Do not be bitter.  Is this latest trial more of a challenge than the others?

You do not see how strong you are.  I have made you strong. 

You, my warrior, my child, have important work still to be done.  You must be my voice, my gentle word, my loving grace.

When you question my judgment, when you wonder why, how could you not know that
I have given you each challenge because you have a mission on earth and your mission can not be accomplished until you have known as much terror, ache, lovepain as life can inflict.  

You are my warrior and you are strong.  
Now dry your tears.  

I am with you and in you and have both created your journey as well as walking it with you.
Trust in me.

 

Shame When Kids at School Talk about Their Summer Vacations.

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a battle you may know nothing about."

My step-father hid his weed under a chair in our living room.  When he had enough money to buy himself his favorite chocolates, a yellow box of Whitman's Sampler, he slid it right under the chair next to the small covered box of pot...

That is the truth.  I'm pretty sure I've never vocalized those words and this would be the first time I've ever written them....

This is a hard entry for me to write.  I have lived my entire adult life as two people.  There is the woman you know, who is the mother of two darling girls, a teacher and a reliable friend.  Perhaps you've followed a memory I've written about my divorce, my real father whom I've never met, or my struggles with cancer.

But there is another person who is constantly right below the surface.  She grew up in adversity.  Struggled through challenges that no child should have to endure.  When I look in the mirror I see her.  She is begging me to tell the truth.  She is pleading to be heard.  She knows if she tells, that other children like her may feel hope.  Sometimes I'll smell something or wake from a dream and it takes me right back to her.  I want to put my arms around her and hold her.  Comfort her.  Then I realize she is me.

She has spent her entire adult life with a mask, ashamed of that part of her that has made her so strong.  She is me.  And today I'm going to take off the mask and embrace her.  I can only share with you a moment of what 38 years has felt like.  I can only provide a glimpse of what it was like to be a child living in fear.  Feeling alone, isolated, left behind, abandoned.

Even one moment of light shed on the adversity may make a difference.  After all, that's why I became a teacher in the first place.  And as a teacher, this past week, I've seen so much anger. So much hate.  I don't know what caused the young man to commit suicide, but what I do know is that his death has caused me to feel the need to write this today.  My heart is full, so full of words and words and memories that are haunting me.  And I know that there are children that are out there that grew up just like me, that have become adults, and are living still in fear, wanting more from life.  Wanting to escape their life.   Not knowing how.

Let me share a piece of my story.

My step-dad was a drunk and then there were times he was not a drunk.  It was like that.  We lived never knowing.  Never knowing what Dad we were going to get.  When he was not drunk he was a fairly good dad.  He played basketball with me and catch and always whipped the ball as hard as he could and told me to toughen up.  He went to my softball games and watched from the end of the parking lot, ashamed to get out and sit in the stands with the other parents.  To this day, I love hate my step-dad.  It is a difficult feeling to have.  To love someone who has crushed me, but who put food on my table, took me to practices, accompanied me in my junior year prom dress shopping.  The man who taught me how to stack wood, measure with a ruler, and coached me with my algebra homework. The sober dad who loved me, even though we never said those words to each other's face.

But there is another dad.  And he was a product of his own tragic childhood.  He had his own personal hell he endured and how can I judge him as an adult when I know his drinking was his mask.  This dad, this drunk, stoned dad.... he was not a good dad.  He was angry and violent and sometimes came home after a night at the bar and sometimes he didn't.  He was a man who cracked a Milwaukee's Best for breakfast with his morning cigarette.  He was and is a man who was such a drunk that when you got close to him you could smell the alcohol reeking from his body.  He never laid a hand on the girls, but he would hit my brother with a belt.  I can remember the sound of him doing that, hurting my brother.  And my brother's cries.  And I felt helpless.  I didn't want him to hurt my brother but I was too afraid to say anything.  Because if I did, maybe he would hurt me.   My mom never let him get close to us.  She protected us and she tried to protect my brother.

I'm guessing you're judging my mom right about now.  You're probably thinking, How could she have let that man do those things?  Why didn't she just leave?  

If life were so simple, then there wouldn't be so much hurt in the world.

My mom gave birth to me in May of 1977, six months after her fifteenth birthday.  I believe that she was a "child having a baby".  As a teacher, I see it all too often.  Girls becoming mothers, just like my own mother.  Sometimes I wonder about their life.  Is their spirit as crushed as my own mother's was at times?  It is not for me to relinquish the secrets of my mother's own troubled childhood.  It should be enough to say that she had even bigger hurdles than I did.  She did what she could with what she had.  She loved us, she comforted us, she sang lullabies to us at night and she kissed our boo-boos.   She read us stories, baked cookies with us, sang Christmas carols and talked to us about life.  It was important to her that we talk about our problems. Under the circumstances, her having been an 8th grade drop-out, I applaud my mother for what she did succeed with... and eventually she did succeed.

When I was 8 years old everything changed.  Tragedy changed us all, and even changed my step-dad for a time.  When I hear people say out of our darkest places, true hope is born, I know this is so.

My 18 month old brother died when I was 8.  He died in my mother's arms as I watched from the backseat.  She had taken him to the doctor countless times,  Potsdam Hospital, Crouse in Syracuse and back to Potsdam.  He's just got the flu, they said.  Give him some children's Tylenol.  Maybe no one took her seriously because she came in dressed like her clothes came from a second hand store, which they did.  Maybe it was her unsophisticated speech, her "ain'ts" and "gonnas" and her errors with subject verb agreement.  Whatever it was, no one took it seriously and so my two sisters and my brother and I watched our baby brother die.

And after that, my mom changed.  Not immediately.  I was only 8 and I watched her lie on the couch with her back to us, covered in a multi-colored afghan blanket.   She did that for a long time.  Too long.  We were kept close to her.  No, you aren't going to ride your bike across the street....

But she did eventually return to school and get her G.E.D.  And as years passed, I found myself helping her with her college work.  I edited her papers and she and I would discuss her coursework.  I was in junior high school at the time.  When other kids were playing sports or hanging out watching tv, I was coming home to babysit and have dinner ready if mom was working.  She would leave me a note on the table.  A list usually of things that needed to get done.  And I was responsible for making sure we each divvied up the chores equally and got them done.  And then, when she needed me, I was  a sounding board for her struggles with college.

But let me back up.  Because I've lost a bit of what I wanted to share and instead got ahead of myself. This entry today I hope, if it leaves you with no other impression, then I want you to understand a little of what it was like to grow up in poverty.  I want to give a voice to all those kids eating free and reduced lunches... kids who might not have a mom like mine.  No one to cuddle them, sing to them, no one to love them.

Just a few thoughts on what poverty means to me:

• Eating government food.  It comes in cans with white labels.  The cheese is so bright yellow that as an adult I refuse to eat orange cheese.
• My mom and my family getting on a bus and leaving one state to go to another thousands of miles away to get away from my step-dad.
• Not knowing who my real father is and never hearing a response when I finally write to him.
• Eating our dinner from a picnic table in our dining room when we had no table.
• Being cold.  
• Refusing to eat school lunch because we had a ticket that the lunch ladies punched and everyone would know I was on welfare if they saw my ticket.
• Waiting until no one was checking out at the grocery store and rushing to check out so no one would see me using food stamps.
• Watching my mom cry because my dad was off on a binge.  
• Watching my mom cry and pack my dad's things in a box and put them on the porch because my dad was off on a binge.
• Watching my dad take an axe and destroy his own truck when he got home and my mom was not there.
• Locking my dad out of the house because he is drunk and we are afraid.
• the sounds of adults partying while I am in my room, trying to sleep.
• My bedroom, without a door, and with plywood on one window and plastic over the other. My dresser missing two drawers.
• Shame when kids at school talk about their summer vacations.
• Getting one pair of sneakers and one outfit from Ames for the new school year and wearing them to bed the night before because I'm so excited to have something new.
• Being afraid in the middle of the night that he might come in and do those things to me again.
• Shame when kids at school tease me about my clothes.
• Wanting to take a shower but we have no water.  Knowing I'm the stinky kid, wishing I could change it.
• Knowing there's no Santa by the time I'm 9 years old and faking it so my brother and sisters can experience the magic a little while longer.
• Crying silently because the kids at school exclude me.  
• Shame when my parents pick me up and they are driving a car that is rusted and falling apart.
• The smell of smoke, thick.  Cigarettes always in the air.  My clothes and hair smelling like a cigarette and knowing I smell like that, but not being able to do anything about it.    
• Studying.  Studying.  Focusing on school and sports and doing everything I can so I can graduate and not ever have to live this way again.
• Being called a lesbian by the guys at school who have no idea that I have no interest in boys because he did those things to me.
• Hearing screaming at night.  Always hearing screaming.  And one morning the screaming is my mom... screaming at dad to call an ambulance,
• Watching my brother die.
• Not wanting to raise my hand because I don't want to be noticed by teachers.
• Meeting my grandfather at 5 years old for the first time and being afraid to let my grandfather hug me because of the times when the bad man touched me where he wasn't supposed to.
• Knowing my mom can't afford a good Christmas, and wanting one so bad.
• Finally telling my mom about the bad touches.
• Getting a job when I'm sixteen and spending my money on my younger sisters and brother, taking them places like the fair, because I want them to have some happiness.

Recently I heard a professor at SLU discussing they were going to have a workshop there so people could experience what it's like to live in poverty.  I felt a strong desire to speak up, but didn't.  Anyone who hasn't endured poverty's wicked ache, can't attend a two day training and know its hunger, its isolation, its shame.

That would be like saying we could watch the movie Lone Survivor and saying we experienced what it is like to be a marine.

Poverty is a cycle.  It's vicious.  It's brutal.  And, saddest of all, for many children, it's a life of secrets, lies, and despair.

I was lucky enough to have a mom who finally stepped out of the mold and broke the cycle. 
I was lucky enough to have teachers that made a difference just like so many of our teachers at MCS do.

There are so many other truths about poverty upon which I could expound, but even this little bit I think is enough.  I've always had the dream that I could help others like me... give a voice to the voiceless.

I'd like to end by connecting this to what I've witnessed as a teacher.

In the MCS school district I've studied the numbers for Free and Reduced lunch as provided by the state of New York.  The heaviness in my heart I feel when I see the numbers creeping toward and toppling 70% in the elementary schools, and only in the 50% range at the high school....is that number decreasing because the disadvantaged are dropping out of school?  That would be my guess.

 If you look at the data regarding how students living in poverty perform compared to their counterparts.  The difference is obvious. It's widespread across the state.  We KNOW that poverty is THE biggest problem.

And yet, I hear so much blame placed on poor people.  Name calling.  I am certainly not making excuses for people who take advantage of the system.  What I'm trying to do is lead you to see.  Living in poverty is almost always synonymous to living without an education.  Living in ignorance.

When uneducated people make uneducated decisions, we, the educated, should not be surprised when their decisions are misguided, inappropriate, sometimes hurtful and even illegal.  We've got an entire generation of impoverished adults who have been living in a system in which welfare has become a way of life.  Who makes the decisions in our culture?  Educated people are supposed to do that.  We can keep pointing fingers and placing blame.

And while you're wasting your time doing that, there is a hungry child somewhere, sitting on a mattress that is laying on a living room floor, watching her father sleeping, taking care not to step on the heroin needles.

It takes a village to raise a child.

And if you're living in poverty and it feels hopeless, it's not. It starts with an education.

No blame.  Only change.
  

“Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope. It is a tool for daily life in modern society. It is a bulwark against poverty, and a building block of development, an essential complement to investments in roads, dams, clinics and factories. Literacy is a platform for democratization, and a vehicle for the promotion of cultural and national identity. Especially for girls and women, it is an agent of family health and nutrition. For everyone, everywhere, literacy is, along with education in general, a basic human right.... Literacy is, finally, the road to human progress and the means through which every man, woman and child can realize his or her full potential.”

~Kofi Annan