#SOL18: Motherhood

The Familiar Falling Away (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. - Solnit, Rebecca. A Field Guide to Getting Lost (p. 22). 

I.

For each easyspace, I have occupied and forward movement felt--grief nonetheless reasserts itself and some days, even two years after, I stumble.  Life after Rob feels cumbersome. The starkest difference between life prior to Rob's death and now is that living life then was effortless. I had no idea.

Loss continues to open me to new understandings. Now, unmoored, life requires a level of attention I did not need before, revealing the unfamiliar--especially of parenting.

II.

The image that tops this post is one I made of Devon running on a day we ditched school and work and I made images of Devon playing in the state park nearby. It was one of those fabulous fog days.

"What do you want me to do?" my son asked.
"Just take off and run. Here, take the umbrella."
"Okay."

Coming through the Rye (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

I did not know that day would later be a placeholder for the intangible time that rises between a son and his mother. Rob had gone to work that morning and Devon and I had gone to play.  I tell you now years later, I am so grateful for all that the image reminds me of and the place viewing it opens.

That was day about love. I did not know that then.

Later, we would return to another field. That evening I would lift my camera and see my son running through the field. Click.

So much more was captured then.


III.

Being a single mom now is stressful and at times, tender. Without Rob to talk through situations, I find myself acknowledging the limitations of being a mom.  There's so much that exceeds my grasp.

This past week my son turned 19. In a few weeks he'll be off to Europe where he so wants to live. I wonder what Rob would have to say about all this? What words might he offer? What perspective would he share? The familiar stance of mother-son has slipped as Devon has aged. What is emerging? Somedays I wonder where we have gone. 

What remains regardless of all of the doubt and worry, tenderness and talk is love. 

#SOL17: Love and Love and Teaching and More Love

painting (May 2017)

I. 

I was reading a post by Kathleen Sokolowski,The Knowing #SOL17. I was touched and honored that she wrote the post in a style I often use these last two years as I have made my way in and out of the twists and valleys that so often typify grief and solace. I leave spaces in my writing--gaps where a reader might roam a bit. I do this by numbering sections, knowing the spaces between numbers will be the gaps readers compose. It's a nod to Wolfgang Iser who first named this for me.  

As lovely as it was to find Kathleen's statement about my style, what caught my eye was a quote at the top of the post:

"As a general rule, teachers teach more by what they are then by what they say." -Unknown

It seemed to demand a response.  


II. 

Devon and Rob at his 8th grade graduation, 6.14.2013

This morning my son, Devon, graduated from high school. Four years ago--almost to the day (June 14, 2013) Devon graduated from eighth grade. I wish I had taken a better photo of Rob and Devon, that day, but I didn't. Nonetheless, can't you just see the love on Rob's face for his son? Who could know that four years ago would mark the only graduation Rob would be alive to witness? Who would have thought that the day his son completed high school he would be dead for more than a year? 

Devon and Rob in Tuscany, 8.10.2013

What I want to write about here though is not that, but rather about a single moment during the graduation that meant more than I could say here.  After all of the speeches had been given, three academic awards were presented to students by faculty. The first one was given to my son by a teacher who taught him every year and befriended him surely. He began by telling a funny story about first meeting Devon as an eighth grader and then spoke about how Devon became more and more a partner than a student during his time at the school. And when he started to mention Devon leaving and going on to Stevens, he choked up, stopped speaking, and momentarily cried. In that moment, Rob Houghton taught more by what he fundamentally is, than by anything he might have said. 

These are moments to notice and savor. 
Don't look away.
We must commit such expressions of love to our memory. Our lives depend on it.


III.

Devon left the house this morning carrying one unwrapped gift in his hand. Just one.

What's in the box? I asked as we drove to graduation.
A motherboard for Mr. Houghton.
Is that something he wanted?
Yep.
Couldn't find wrapping? I teased.
We nerds don't wrap. And Houghton? He's like an original nerd.


IV.

If you listen to pundits talk about education and there's lots of chatter about higher standards, grit, data driven instruction, performance gains, STEM, and being college-ready (whatever that might mean). We pay big bucks, billions actually, to annually measure how well every learner can perform on a narrow set of outcomes so often determined by pseudo-educators and then we claim that those results represent the value of their teachers and schools. 

Pure idiocy. 

Frankly, such tests are woefully incomplete, often erroneous, partial snapshots at best, and very costly to students, teachers, and our wallets.

This morning, Mr Houghton got it right. He showed us what matters more than the ed buzzwords and is a much finer expression of a teacher, a student and the learning they have composed. Great teaching isn't about stanine growth. 

Great teaching inspires us to compose better versions of ourselves. That's what Mr. Houghton's actions were teaching us this morning. 

Love endures.  It inspires. It is the energy that survives well beyond the breakdown of our human bodies. 


V.

It has been a tough, tough six weeks--in many ways the toughest I have ever known. And after the ceremony I made my way to Mr. Houghton to simply thank him.  

What Dev has been going through these last weeks? he began, sounding so certain.
I nodded and said, Yes.
It's been good for him. May not feel like it. But it's been good for him. He needs to get this out.

I nodded and touched his arm and think I may have said, thank you although I am not sure.


VI.

A doctor explained that for Devon it's like his dad died a week ago. Delayed grief is the psychological term. 

He was my best friend, my son would tell me. I miss him every day. 

Some pain is so big it cannot find expression until it bleeds out of us.


VII.

I wish I could have done better for my son at this moment of great pain. I wish that when I had to fail him, it would not have been now--not when the stakes are so very high. There simply is no one on this planet who I love as I do my son.  But in his eyes,  I failed him in ways that have scarred him, in ways I cannot find the words to say here. 

What I learned this morning is that others have stepped in to love him when he would not allow me do so. And for that I am grateful.


VIII.

Though Devon's dad was not there this morning, my brother, Jack and my friend, Jane each assured me that they strongly felt his presence throughout the ceremony.  Jane told me in an email late this afternoon, and Jack told me before he left our home today. 

Mary, I felt him. Rob was there in that auditorium. He's watching over Dev and you. I know it. 

Each was so certain and each is gifted in such ways. We have long joked in my family that my brother is like St. Francis of Assisi. All the animals come to him: abandoned dogs and snakes; raccoons and birds. They all seem to sense that gentle kind soul he harbors.  And Jane? Well, she dreams. Always has. I imagine always will. Prophetic dreams that open her to what most of us simply miss and keep her open when she is no longer sleeping. 

Mr. Houghton, Jack and Jane remind me that there are many ways to be in this world--ways that my son has learned as well. 


IX.

Stay open to love, I tell myself--for even when I cannot feel Rob, others do and that fills me with hope.

Stay open to love I say to Devon, for it heals and redeems us when we cannot seem to find the road we most need to walk.

#SOL16: Love Sounds for My Son

Collage made from Citra Solve papers (M.A. Reilly, July 2016)

I'm pulled from bed this morning with the need to write.  I have been dreaming awake. This post that will take form here began as lines in a dream--words forming first as sound and then whole lines as I was partially awake and now they have become this print. There's a tremendous sadness I feel when I think of my son and the loss of his dad. Dev was one month past his 17th birthday when Rob died. Barely 17. And I think this morning that there will be no father's steady hand to guide him.

This morning fear pulled me from bed.

And make no mistake it is not the fear that Donald Trump spoke about last week. That fear is frankly too pretty--too full of apocalyptic con and slight of hand. The fear Trump railed about is more comic-like, less substance.

The fear that pulled me from bed was fear lodged in my throat. It was fear of what is not now. It was fear in what I imagined might be, in the many instances my son will hurt without his dad there too soothe. And yes, I know I will soothe when I am allowed when I am even knowledgeable, just as I know there already have been days when my touch, my concern, my care was not found nor invited. Some pain is private. There are days when my son's loss finds purchase and steals his breath and I must bear witness. He will fix himself if fixing is needed, but mostly he will endure and add that experience to the emotional chest he has been building since birth.

This is what I can feel. This is what I can endure. This is the taste of sorrow. This is the slash of loss. This beneath it all is love.

And here in the daylight, I wonder if he will be a stronger man as a result of this loss. Will the empathy that comes with losing love, losing a father fuel his drive, his care, his dedication to others? Will his knowledge of other shine, be a beacon of hope?  What trajectories will his life compose?

Mothers know much and nothing.

What I do believe is that love is by invitation. It cannot be forced. Love is more powerful, more constant than fear.

My love for my son is a constant note that sounds below and above the daily actions I take. It sounds even when fear lights like a fuse. Love allows me to know how temporary fear is: a bright light that blazes and then dies as it should, as it must for we are here, living.

Love sounds even when I am blinded
                  by fear and

                              I follow those notes
               
                         a handful
                                 of musical breadcrumbs
                                  tossed from the hands I have known and not,
                                  tossed from my own hands years earlier.

I follow that line of music
                         leaving behind a dense, imposing forest
             
and find myself here
              in morning light,
              the burn of fear left behind--the shroud of a dream alongside it.

Here in a clearing called morning
love has called me from sleep, from fear
and I have answered
with a handful of words.




Afternote:
I wrote this I realized while sitting in Rob's chair and the feel of the music in the writing sounds a lot like Rob's voice. 

#SOL16: A Son and the Word of God

The New Fire Truck 

I.

When I think of the many ways that Rob loved his son, I am reminded of a line from Cormac McCarthy's The Road. At the beginning of the novel, the father is speaking about his son and says, "He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke."

The word of God. Yes, that is how complete and full Rob's love for Devon was. But now and again I wonder if Devon will really remember his dad.  He is just 17. Will he be able to still hear the sound of his dad's voice? Will he recall the many car trips? Will he recall watching each episode of Stars Wars with him multiple times save the most recent one that his dad could not see? Will he remember how his dad smelled? How he walked? The sound of his laugh? The way he ran his hands through his loose hair gathering the strands into a pony tale? How he looked you in the eyes so directly when you spoke?

My mom and me

What memories will remain after a year?
Ten years?
Forty years?
What will he most remember about his Dad?

II.

On the bureau in our bedroom is a photograph of my mom and me. I am most likely 12, just a few years younger than Devon is now.  When I look at the photo, I realize that I can't recall much of anything from that time--and certainly nothing related to how I was feeling or the way my mom was. That time is quite lost. I'm astounded by what I can't recall. Viewing the image has me wondering how much of the time Dev spent with his dad will he really remember as the decades march by.

#SOL16: Dichotomies

self portrait (M.A. Reilly, 2016)

I.

It's the way he tucks her arm through his with such delicate care that catches my heart and holds my attention.  I notice the older couple, most likely in their late 80s or early 90s, seated opposite me at the local diner.  The couple sits next to one another on the same side of a booth. Opposite them is another gentleman, not quite as old.  The husband stands and he waits for his wife to zip her jacket and then holds a hand out to help her stand, before moving her arm through his. This is practiced love, I think.

Dev at a restaurant, checking out a camera (2015)

Devon and I have come for breakfast on a Saturday morning--a local place that when Rob was alive he frequented most mornings. It's an old haunt and we are all known by our first names.

"We'll see you next week, Michele," the man calls to the waitress. And then he laughs and adds, "if the good Lord makes it so."

I'm quiet until they pass.

"When I thought about the future, I always imagined that your dad and I would be just like that," I say to Devon, using the napkin to carefully wipe away a few tears. "I never doubted that your dad and I would grow old together. Nothing gained by doubting."

One of the interesting things about my son is he knows how to gather silence around him. And so he doesn't rush in to say something.

"You okay?" he asks a minute or two later.
I nod and then say, "I'm not crying because I'm sad." He smiles and I add on, "It's just they are so beautiful. So careful with one another. You know?"

II.

The last 24 hours have been tough on both of us. Yesterday morning I finally got my hair cut, after 8 months and on the way out people expressed condolences and also wished me a happy holiday. On the way home I stopped at a wine shop so I could bring some wine to my cousin as we will be eating Easter dinner with them tomorrow. Easter has never been a big holiday at our house. And though Rob was Jewish, we celebrated Easter with usually just my brothers or sometimes friends. I didn't expect the holiday to matter and find it does. At the wine shop as I am checking out, the cashier told me, "Have a happy Easter." Later I ran into a grocery store and the clerk at the check out said, "Have a great holiday tomorrow."

In the early afternoon, I took Devon for his driver's test only to find out Motor Vehicle was closed. Rob was supposed to take Devon last August after his friends who had visited with us went home. Rob became sick and Devon being who he is told us both to not worry about it.  "I'm not in any hurry," he would say. Rob and I appreciated his patience.

"How about we go to Cheesecake Factory and you can get that burger you like?" I asked him knowing we were just a few miles from the restaurant.
"Sounds good," he said.

After lunch we stopped off to look for a kitchen table and chairs.
"I want to do this with you so you can sit in the chair.  It needs to be comfortable," I explained and I laughed a bit at the look my son gave me. I imagined him thinking, We really need to do this now? He is not a shopper.

Last February, in order to make room for Rob's hospital bed, Devon and I got rid of a round table that had been in our kitchen for the last 14 years. It had seen better days and Rob and I had been looking to replace it last summer but never got it done. Now the room is empty and Devon and I keep hitting our heads on a low hanging light fixture.  We finally settled on a table and four chairs and as we leave the store I turned and said to Dev, "I can't recall buying any furniture for the last couple of decades without Rob. This feels so strange to buy this without him."

III.

Last night a little after 10 p.m. Devon came in and sat on the bed.  This is a signal that he wants to talk.
"What's up?"
"Nothing much," he said and his face held a sadness that tugged at me.
I waited a bit hoping he'd talk but he remained silent. "You okay?" I asked.
"Just a hard day," he told me and was quiet again.
I keep the quiet with him.
"Kept thinking about the restaurant and all the times I went there with dad."
"Yeah, you both loved it there. Your dad was always stealing a French fry or two."
We both laughed a bit thinking of Rob, thinking of us together.
"Good burgers," Dev said.
"Good memories, too."

It was their kind of place, I think. Love is so difficult, so effortless, so tenacious. We are nothing if we are not equally complex and simple.

These dichotomies define grief as well.

For it is both the small imperceptible ordinary happenings and the larger already known events that trip us up--let us know that we have loved so profoundly and lost equally so.

#SOL15: Noli Timere

What is Written (M.A. Reilly, 2010, Sant’Anna in Camprena, Pienza)

Noli timere. (Do not be afraid).

I.

There is no emotional preparation for death.

There's nothing that will soften the pain or let loose the frenzied despair that seems now to form the marrow of my bones. Pain is elemental and what I most wish to distance my son from cannot be had. No amount of preparation, no amount of bartering, no desperate late night promises to God will ease our loss.

I know this even as I try not to.

II.

Years ago I sat in the back seat of a limousine with Rob who wrapped his hand around mine. We were stopped at a light and I spent those minutes looking into the windows of cars, fascinated by the ordinary lives of others.  It was a wild animal desperation that seized me, urged me to covet the imagined lives of those passing by. I wanted to loose my body in those moments and become someone else, anyone else, anyone but myself.

Too frantic to sit in my own skin, I shifted as the car started and the truth is that it was only Rob's hand wrapped around mine that tethered me to the earth as we made our way to the cemetery to bury my mother on a too beautiful, too spring day in early May. I simply did not know how to be in the world with her no longer here and my husband's touch was an anchor I could not know I needed.

Touch matters.

III.

Loss can not be preempted.

This is a hard truth I learned at 40 and an impossibly cruel one to learn at 17. My son  is two months shy of that mark and as I watch him I wonder if he is too young to bear the weight of such loss. I want to gather him to me and tell him to prepare, but I don't do this as those words are more for me than him.  I have left the here and now--the place where hope is still kindled and have traveled to a darker, distant time where no amount of preparation can soften what the heart cannot decipher.


IV.

I resist the mistaken urge to caution him about matters of death and loss and instead reach out and hold his hand.

We will hurt, I think.
And this pain will reveal the many ways we have been loved.

What it Was I Was Listening For

                                               ...The space we stood around had been emptied
                                               Into us to keep, it penetrated
                                               Clearances that suddenly stood open.
                                               High cries were felled and pure change happened.

                                                                                - Seamus Heaney, from Clearances, VII


I.

Forgetfulness (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

On a too early day in May, I watched my mother die. There is simply no easy way to buffer that truth. I stood beside her bed, touching and not touching, hearing even now, fifteen years removed, her chest rattle as I bargained with an indifferent God. Just a bit more time though I knew she suffered. And regardless of all of those years I spent on my knees--the hard kneeler a kind of penance for sins committed and not--God was mute. Tight-lipped. Taciturn.

I never quite knew what it was I was listening for.

II.

Time passes like a list begun more than once, left tucked inside the pocket of a winter coat worn last season. This is how grief moves and fails to move. Memories arise from the least provocation like a wave that swamps me. And I am drowning here on a Tuesday morning on day too much like the day we set her in the ground--a too beautiful, too early spring day at that.  I sit next to the grown daughter and her mom--both out for some talk, out for a pair of pedicures--nothing too goddamn special.  And it's the ordinariness of it that most undoes me.

I am desperate for Heaney's pure change.

III.

There's little to know when burying the dead. Knowing is a false balm that does not soothe. Knowing is a way to stand still, like that cup of tea made and remade that is still waiting on the counter, long cooled and forgotten.  With each lived moment, I edge closer to leaving and nothing terrifies me more than the thought of my son bargaining with some god on a too early, too spring morning. What words will he proffer?  Have I even taught him how to listen?  Language is a vice--one part fixed, one part moving--a bolt through the heart.

I tell you love is nothing if not epic.

Oh You Got Trouble, Right Here in River City (#SOL 15, Day 18)

Gaming (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

For the good citizens of River City in 1912--it was the pool table.

Harold, con man, music man tells the parents that "the idle brain is the devil's playground!" You know the story: The young boys of the city allowed to spend their days at the pool hall will likely be frittering away time playing pool, betting on games, ignoring their chores--and later associating with libertine men and scarlet women as they dance to shameless music that is sure to grab your son and daughter.

Moral panic.

Certainty (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

II.

Moral panic is a term coined by British sociologist Stanley Cohen in the early 1970s in his book Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and the Rockers. Cohen defines moral panic as:

A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes more visible (p. 1). 

When faced with a societal crisis that is felt by the in-group, blame happens. Often it's the schools, regardless of decade or century.  In 1912 it was the pool hall. Some years later it would be alcohol, gambling, then television viewing, marijuana, hippies, draft dodgers, rockers, television violence, drugs, metal heads, rappers, absent fathers, school bullying, video violence, and more recently--video gamers and hackers.

Moral panic requires a suitable enemy, a suitable victim, and a belief that the action being denounced is an integral part of society.  These conditions maintain power and privilege.


III.

Being a parent is hard work.  I tell this to my son at dinner.   I want him to know that it isn't the usual stuff that makes parenting so challenging, but rather the awful norming that comes in the guise of friendly truths.  These are the truths of your day--the ones your neighbors and mayor and school crossing guard tell you. These are the truths that your peers live and in doing so they may find it imperative that you to live accordingly, too.

If not...

Trouble...Trouble...Trouble...Trouble...

Cohen explains that "[s]omething done by an out-group is simply condemned and fitted into the scheme of things, but in-group deviance is embarrassing, it threatens the norms of the group and tends to blur its boundaries with the out group" (p. 222).

What norms us, often kills us--not necessarily our bodies, but surely our spirits.

Longing For the Known

Happiness is the Longing for Repetition (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

I. Listening

The day is older now. The light nearly gone. The end of November and my son's friends who spent the weekend are gone and we are in the car.  I'm thinking about neighborhoods as we climb the hill towards home when I have this sudden image of my son years from now working as a writer. As I drive, I realize that I am mostly wondering what stories he will tell--what neighborhood he'll recall. Will he recall these days with fondness?

"Perhaps you'll be a writer," I say. 

"Could be," he offers. "I don't really know about my future. Kind of ruin it if I did." 

He says all of this matter-of-factly and it surprises me.  "How's so?"
"Not knowing. That's the only thing to know, right?"

I love these trips in the car with him. Somehow the distance between a mom and her teenage son is diminished when confined to a car. I really listen to him. I listen better.

"Do you ever imagine what you might be doing?" I ask.
"Mostly pushing at boundaries. Rethinking what it means to be a human being."
"What do you mean?
"Well, being human comes down to doing just three things: creating, discovering, and sustaining. That's how I see it. I want to create. Make stuff. I want to work in ways that I actively am discovering and through all of this I want to make the things I create sustainable."  

 "Those are admirable goals," I tell him.

"We need to be smart especially about sustaining the planet. We're fucking it up and we have to rethink our relationship.  We can't continue to take." 

"Do you think your generation might do things differently than mine?"
"Well we can't keep on the way we are now.  I mean with just a few owning most of the global markets, we're so out of balance. We've lost the local." 

"How do you imagine resettling the balance?"
"Hmm. Taking power back. Taking it back from the few who hold it now. I know that has to happen. Well, it's necessary and all,  but I don't see that going too well."

We drive on and I think of the many who have come and gone before this moment--those who have needed to resettle power--who have tried to resettle the balance.

II. Telling

There are two photographs I keep of my Da. The first was made in Maine while he was on a camping trip with my brothers and some friends. He is seated alone in a rowboat on a lake. He is holding a daisy in his hand. I called it his Hemingway moment. The light is harsh. It's the summer of 1967 and he's as still as the noon-day lake. Contemplative.

The second is of him 10 years later holding a protest sign at an environmental rally. The sign reads: "Hell No, We Won't Glow!"  Someone caught him turning towards the camera, chanting. He was protesting the U.S. government's attempt to dump radioactive waste in a woodland. My brothers and I would laugh when we'd look at this photograph as my father is wearing his customary black socks and sandals.  When we were teenagers, we tried not to walk alongside him when he donned what we considered ridiculous outfits. How could I have realized then that he was more Thoreau-like, walking to a drum he heard.

III. Stories We Tell

Well after we are home, I am thinking about the photographs and the car talk and consider that Milan Kundera was right. In small and profound ways, we all long for repetition. It is the longing for the known that makes us happy.

I think the repetition we most desire is realized, as it is revealed, in the stories we tell our children. It is these oral stories that give shape, in part, to lives.  Here, now, I want to believe that the stories my son hears from his father, his uncles, an elderly aunt, cousins, and me are what matter most. These stories represent a loving legacy we gift to him.

Family stories are all about the definition and the limitations of love. I wish my father had lived longer. I wish it with my full heart. I wonder what stories he would be telling his grandson.

Not Being College and Career Ready: A Way of (re)Learning

Sisyphus (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

I.

What I most need to know is that journeys cross divides.

II.

The young man is of an age where the shift from paper to networks as a means to gather, organize, analyze, and communicate information was more known than not; less truth than surprise. He has seen how hierarchy must give way to adaptation, rigidity to flexibility. The need for such accounting has passed.

Poised between, many of us still carry what it means to be human in the age of paper.  We have not lost this sense of self and it (in)forms our priorities, necessities, and policies.  This way of knowing allows us to utter small, untruths about the importance of being ready.

III.

Some days I hear my son when he tells me (by what he values) that we need not be bound to the paper mythologies that have given us definition.  There are newer ways to (re)learn.

Newer ways, I think. And so I repeat, like a weak mantra, like a mother unsure:

The individual is overrated, romanticized. 

Readiness is a fixture of modernity. 

Prescription is not a synonym for description.

I repeat all of this as he tells me going to college is not a road walking. What I need to remember is that he is not lighting out for the territory, ahead of the rest. The need to be first is a need best forgotten.

IV.

What I most need to know is that when we enter into cleared, unstriated spaces the desire to reterritorialize is strong. Seductive. Present.  This is the way it has always been. Our need to code and recode is formidable.

"A discarded necklace is a map of love. A dagger is a map of betrayal" (Masny & Cole, 2012).

The need to map is powerful.

V.

What I most need to know is that people journeying are (re)naming, making new maps, becoming fixed and unfixed.  Living.

Becoming is infinitely more interesting than being.

Being ready is an untruth my son has been told by his teachers, his father, me.
Being ready is mostly about a suspension of breath.  An educational apnea.

There is no being ready.  There is now.

Even as we loosen ourselves from that which binds us, our ideas and actions can still be colored by historical (mis)understandings.

There is no readiness for a boy's future. 

Maps have no beginning and no end.  

My maps have been fraught with false stops, the legacy of paper, the legacy of readiness.

"What maps will our children make?" is the better question to pose.

Cited:

Masny, Diana; Cole, David R. (2012-06-14). Mapping Multiple Literacies: An Introduction to Deleuzian Literacy Studies. Continnuum-3PL. Kindle Edition.

Birds Lifting

Birds Lifting (Reilly, 2012)

I.

I'm driving. Dev, my 15-year-old son, turns in the seat and says to me, "There's no getting to what is needed without first protesting."

I'm silent, thinking.

"Not even things that should just be given cause we all know that they're good. These days you can't get to it without a protest."

I listen, refuse to rush in and fill the space his words have opened.

"It's our interests against the corporations and the only way to get our government to actually work, to do what we've put them in office to do, is to protest," he adds. "Everything requires us to protest."

More silence. More space opening.

"It hasn't always been this way," he says in a voice that feels somewhat younger--almost as if he wasn't making a statement.

Or perhaps that's how I want to hear him.

I feel his absence of faith.
Perhaps, I'm feeling my own as well.

"You're right. It hasn't."

As we almost crest the hill that leads to our home, I slow the car and we wait there in the middle of the road. An unsafe place for sure, just below the crest of the hill. We wait as hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of black birds ascend from tree branches, shrubs, and lawns--darting across the road towards the woods. We sit and watch. The car idles, the windows are down, the roof is open and the birds fly--a steady stream of black interrupted now and then by bits of slate grey sky.

"Wow, a Hitchcock moment," I say to Devon.

We are of few words.

II.

I'm putting away groceries thinking about my son's declaration and I'm reminded of a far earlier time--one where I'm talking loudly with my Da. It's dusk, a half-hour or so before supper and I'm explaining to him how we have a caste system akin to India and he's arguing back, a Manhattan at his ready, saying it's not quite so bad. There are still possibilities.

I think he's being less than truthful, choosing his words with some care. I watch as he takes a sip of his drink, pauses. Yes, he's being careful not to deny that a caste system of sorts exists here or at least that's how I'm hearing it, how I'm remembering it. This is the man who took us across the country to the Painted Desert to see what our government had done to the Navajos.

Love is so inconsistent.

They won't teach you this at school, he tells my older brothers and me.

We head towards Interstate 40 traveling East on a road that is marked only by a thin single grey line on the map. I can still see the face of the girl who looked to be about my age, who stood opposite me in that harsh desert light each us bound by the heat. I can see her hand as she takes the few coins from my palm. Her nails are dirty, mine ragged. I bought a small totem she had painted. I still have it, decades later, packed away in a box stashed in my dead father's' attic. This is the way it is. Regardless of where we store the trinkets we've collected along the way, we continue to bear their weight.

And so, on that late day I'm thinking he should know better. I've been telling him about Vicki Battle and how we're friends on the field, just the field. I play third base and she's our short stop. We know how to work the field, back one another up. We've been doing it for years. My Da has watched us play.  But I'm telling him now with some urgency that she and her family live down by the tracks on a block packed with narrow, attached two-story houses. The train runs behind her home.  He knows the area and nods. And it's just like Caesar's place I add. A boyfriend with a notable name, Caesar Chavez, who lives just a town away, who lives above a bar. Trains run behind his apartment too, rattling the windows that are lit by neon.  Between us is such distance--a möbius strip that keeps us from touching.

We live further up the hill where there are no trains, no tracks, no neon. Here, narrow driveways separate one house from the next.  An odd repetition.


III.

I wonder what stories my son will tell when I am no longer here, no longer alive. We are always moving towards death. I wonder who will witness his tales. Who will hear his voice?

Will he remember a fall afternoon thick with black birds?
Will he tell about the time when he first recognized that the only way for right to happen in the world was to first protest?

Injustice is a constant that connects generations.

I wish I could be more clever, more in the moment. But the moment has gone. What I wanted him to know, but failed to tell him, was that difference has never been an antonym for sameness.

Painting Like a 3-Year-Old: A Keepsake

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. Pablo Picasso

When my son was a toddler, one of the things we routinely did was paint. He loved to mess around. I recently spent some time looking at two paintings he had done at 3 years of age. I can recall being taken by them and waiting days for the paint to dry. I then matted and framed each, thinking these would be important keepsakes--ones I would want him to have when he got older--ones I would have trouble parting with. This morning, I snapped a picture of each image and decided another way to preserve them would be to do so here, in this inbetween world.

I am reminded when I view them at his wild abandon as he painted with fingers, hands, arms, and now and then a brush. He seemed to have an instinct for color in the many ways he combined colors or perhaps it was more the absence of fear of error that prompted his experimentation.  There also was movement that typfied his art making--not so unusual at 3.  Making art is a full body experience, especially when you are a toddler up to your elbows in paint.  It is something we would do well to recall as we age. And then there was the kindness: "Mommy, for you," he said offering his art so freely in a manner that still makes my heart hurt just a bit.  I can recall the paint more on him than the paintings as he reached out with his hands.

These things: color, movement, and kindness are the story.  The absence of making an error is the gift.

A decade has past and now this child is teenager and I want to say to him:

Be wild, let instinct guide your steps.
Abandon the fear of failure that often dogs our steps as we age.

Make mistakes.

Seek color and movement in the way you chose to live.
See possibility in yourself and especially in others. 
Remain generous. 
Remain kind.