Monday, April 11, 2011

Time to Heal

Spring is bleed season. Eden falls, he gets bumped, and he runs around until the spaces between his ankle bones begin to fill with blood. It happens every year when the weather gets warm.

Eden is so unlike Sage. Sage would get a hint of a scrape and happily go to bed for several days. No injury ever went unnoticed or unattended. Eden is different. He keeps going, cheerfully, until someone notices he is limping.

He was two when his ankle first betrayed him,  bleeding and swelling, and he limped along happily, and I could not get him to sit down and rest. His ankle has never been the same, and it flares up sometimes, like today.

He is like that emotionally, too, happily moving along, content with his allotment of attention, which is a somewhat smaller portion than his brothers, especially Jude, who is consuming. I am consumed. I wish I could find balance, but it is almost impossible. Sometimes Eden and I sneak off like secret lovers to read books and draw things, but sometimes the day has gotten away and he is in bed before I know it, and another day of his childhood has slipped through my hands.

Today his ankle is doing its thing, swollen and red and painful. I saw him limping on the way out the door to a friend's house, and now we are on the couch together, trying to hold still, trying not to bleed or hurt too much. If we are very still we can taste what love is, and know our hearts, and see the sun  filter through the curtains, and remember that we love each other, and hold today, just this hour inside our hearts. This is serious business, and our job today is to admit we are hurting, and let the healing begin.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Starman

There's a starman, waiting in the sky, he'd like to come and meet us, but he thinks he'd blow our minds...

Jude has new clothes. He should be pleased, or indifferent. New clothes are different, though, so it freaks him out. Deeply. "Jude Hills don't like different" he informs me. This has created so much anxiety for him that he will not let me out of his sight.

So I am on the couch, and he is on a sleeping bag on the floor, asking me every three minutes if I will stay. "Stay, Mama." Okay, I will stay. Bowie is coming through the headphones and Eden has come in and laid his head in my lap. Sage sleeps next door, tossing in his angst of voice cracking hormones and earnestness that breaks my heart. Was I ever that innocent?

Bowie reminds me of when I was that age, smoking Kools snuck from my mother's purse and listening to Starman behind the garage. I never did anything right, not one freaking thing. Flunking out of school, drinking, dating a guy my parents hated, being a smartass in general. I wished they liked me, but I was unwilling to give in and stop acting as if I did not care.

Menthol burned my lungs and I could see my neighbor puttering around his yard. I hated everything about this life, big brick houses and no sidewalks. Doctors and lawyers lived in those houses and they were all miserable as far as I could see. I wanted to run away, go to Amsterdam, marry a rock star, live on a farm, become a gypsy or follow the Grateful Dead.

Here I am, sitting in the dark, listening to Bowie, Starman in fact, but I am not smoking and not quite so lost.  There is a red headed boy snoring in my lap and a voice saying, stay, stay... and these things belong to me, a gift from someone who saw me sitting by the garage in the cold, alone, smoking and wondering if I would ever, ever love or be loved.  I wish I could go back and tell my smoking sad self that love was waiting, and not to be afraid. I want to go into my son's room and tell him that good things await, good things are on their way, but I don't, because he has to find them himself, and he is not me,  not by a long shot.

I never followed the Dead, never went to Amsterdam, never lived on a farm, but I don't live in the burbs, and my life has meaning and purpose, and has been full of wonder and friendship and laughter and music and joy. Good things for sure. My boundaries have been set in pleasant places, because I am loved, by someone who was watching, waiting, and had good things in store, good things for me to find.
I think Jude is asleep, and I can crawl in to bed with someone I love and who loves me best of all, and dream for my sons, dreams where they walk and uncover all sort of love and good things that they never even knew they wanted, finding gifts that were waiting all along.