The moon recites the prayer with me, tethered to a God who never sleeps Our Father, who art in heaven…where does the slivery-thin-orange moon go when it passes below the shoulder of the hill? To all the other insomniacs…hallowed be thy name…indeed You hear me, Maker of that smoke wisp moon, Maker of the metonymy of darkness, a body can rob a body of light until You are here …Thy kingdom come…thy will be done…among the sleepless…on earth as it is in heaven.
Deep porch for rocking. Wrap around so that the boy with the ol’ stick horse can barrel around each corner. A telephone nook even though we both know nobody calls anymore. And the unwieldy kitchen in the heart of it all-ghost-kitchen attempting to take natural light from the living and sun rooms respectively while even the closets have seen things, terrible things
As if an old house could ever just stand by and
say nothing at all.
Given the choice between
Chilling with
A flock of wolves meticulously dressed up in sheep’s clothing
Or a pack of sheep
Aiming to pass for wolves
I would always pick the latter
how about you?
After being accused of lying, or at least not stopping? lying, I looked it up–were CPCs nefariously posing as abortion clinics in order to dupe the unsuspectingly pregnant into not killing their unborn children?!
Maybe.
Interesting because it has not been my experience that they did that. I went through a CPC training course many, many years ago and was very impressed by the quality of the training. The leaders emphasized that the CPC counselors were there to
They seemed wise, kind, calm, and their cookies were warm and homemade.
That being said, let us be very straight on this–as far as I can tell (from the internet) not one single human being–ambulatory or prenatal–has ever been deprived of life by the machinations of any Crisis Pregnancy Center.
So perhaps we should ask ourselves this–if your pregnant mother had walked (in crisis) into either a very truthful abortion facilitatory or a very deceptive crisis pregnancy center, which would have given you, the still pre-birthday you, a chance at living long enough to read this blog?
We will all be judge by the sign makers of Auschwitz for we have had the power to speak freely on the behalf of our murdered unborn daughters…
Unwilling or unable to acknowledge which side Harriet Tubman, Corrie Ten Boom, or Anne Frank would take in this brouhaha over deadly truths and life-affirming deceptions.
All the million things I leave undone, my own personal Pacific swirl, Bermuda Triangle, fourth dimensional hole filled with things I should organize, give away, relinquish or abandon
Like anger or the mold that grows along joints and fissures
I would call the same band by two names
Pascal’s Wager or T-shirts
They would sing exactly the same songs, be beautiful and wise beyond their years, know why two names for the same band …have their
father’s ear for music
their mother’s words
And a cleaner house once all our borrowed stories are returned
I can’t help but stare at the picture of this family swept out to sea. I know what it is like to attempt to parent children from “hard backgrounds.”
And yes, I have often tried to assuage my deep grief about the damage caused by my adopted children by telling myself that we have survived (so far).
None of this is fun to talk about, but I did talk–sometimes unsparingly, because I hoped that if people heard our story they could do something to prevent tragedies like ours.
More than the average mama, I can put myself in the shoes of these mamas, and I have two things to thing to say–
Just: a story of the lost and found https://www.amazon.com/dp/1468123459/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_JPNWAbDZT3TR5
It is a small label inside a second-hand London fog. Sez “waterproof” in a way that means tell the dam story. Which I tell in my head in one way or another
Every day
Protagonists too vivid to fictionalize and actual jackass antagonists who are surprisingly two dimensional for real people in a small
Awful story I don’t want to tell, but my lovely black raincoat says I must.
Over my shoulder I hear the PBS lady tell my sons about blizzards, how they are just snow storms unless the wind is strong and fast. Here in Texas we have driving rain, not driven snow, and it is the percussive light which wakes the dogs in the night. Poised for a fight. Hurricanes have the eyes of Quint’s soulless sharks as they roll across the landscape of childhood and wakefulness I will momentarily regret the home I left in fear. Regret what I did not leave there. Regret what I did, but not the winds. The winds around the eye, the deceptively calm eye, of every storm that changes the landscape
Of who we once were.
This started as a break up but ended with old friend, Wakefulness here in the dark, in the storm
It was a dark and stormy night! But it was the dogs that kept me up
Dogs of the past
Dogs of war
That dog whose name* I can’t remember who re-enacted classics like The Prince and the Pauper.
When names and sleep elude you, there are sheep. They start out chalky, outlined, and two dimensional, but they elaborate
In depth, complexity, and general fluffiness, but also about the weather, dogs barking at night, and all the ways it was and wasn’t my fault this chance we took hurt so much.
*Wishbone
The weirdest thing how brave not knowing makes you. Not knowing the crash. Not knowing the presence of wrong. Not knowing the feral son has been a monster all along. He will not turn into a real boy instead he will be ever-so-carefully excised from the picture of the ordinary house, where trees have grown a rampart around all
who survive him.
Carrying Light 