Returning To Writing: No edit!

After being VERY sick for almost a month, I returned to journal writing. This was my very first entry in almost 1 month. Then, I continued to write in a creative writing class I taught that night. I felt so great after writing. I felt like I just got off the massage table, had a great shower, or a long, long run. The content, to me, was irrelevant. It was the stretching out of my limbs as I reenter my writing world.


Things I want to write about include the bitter sweetness of having a daughter I love and like and adore and everything all at once. We are living through and with and around another HUGE milestone. Potty training is really the first of many enormous separations I see it as the beginning of the hardest part of my job as her mother…letting her go. Letting her grow up and become a launched person who is independently thinking and conscious of herself and her boundaries in the world. I love how she said to Mike and I today and literally from the second day of the training “Mommy, Daddy give me privacy. Close the door.” I love that. I hear that and I think: Accomplished. That is my goal to foster a true individual voice and a solid sense of self, her self not mine. Her fav. colors are yellow, red, pink while mine are green brown and blue. We are different and we allow one another to be¬– no group think no projecting it is the worst thing to do to a child and it makes them feel powerless I felt that with my parents except when it came to my writing that was always mine My body, appearance, all that was not it was all seen through their eyes and their eyes on their own bodies and their own feelings of self doubt and embarrassment.

If there’s one thing I hope for as apparent is to allow my daughter to be herself completely and allow for her to do what she needs to go through her own process be herself completely. Never project things on to her but instead show and teach and guide and if she rejects things that’s fine. She hates blue shirts I lover her in blue shirts oh well the blue shirt remains in the closet. I would love it if she ate more carrots and apples….I offer and explain their benefits, she rejects. I must trust her and her process as she becomes independent and I must never silence her. She through a fit today because we wanted her to stay upstairs with us to play while we made lunch. I have never seen her thrash and pound. We continued to do out thing and only gave parameters, safety for her while she “fitted”. Then we let her do her thing. That’s how parenting is. We can only control what we can and then we simply offer and suggest and then let go.

There’re moments like today when mike and I were at the bank and Mom and Chels took off to Tiverton, the first trip sans diapers with Bubbie, there was a moment while we waited to sign the papers were being printed and Helen our loan officer had left the cube, I was wearing my bucket hat, a new signature item, I have never had a signature item except a horrendously huge purse in the vain of Alley Sheedy in the Breakfast club. Anyway, there was a moment that split in two and I was able to feel on a visceral level the moment of the moment and the moment behind it and it felt like honey and gold and love and I thought of Chelsea and I don’t know what my thoughts were exactly something like appreciation maybe of just that I have her and then of children and the gift of life being alive of her life of her presence of what she teaches me and how much better I am having born her and being her mother.

I saw the mother of 8 children on TV last night and she was having free plastic surgery because her stomach looked like someone’s butt but on the wrong side of the body, saggy and baggy. She looked so graceful and serene as a mother as she cooked up 16 meals for when she was home recovering and her husband would be in charge he claimed with a stupid laugh I don’t cook. What a dick. But later you saw the ease with which they laugh and manage their lives and even in the chaos Dad scored points with me later when they showed him doing his nightly routine with all 8 kids, bath and bed….he had fun remarking in the middle of it all, someone took a dump on the floor! Yuck! All the children laughed. I laughed. It was 1 pm in the morning for me and I had been kind of feeling sorry for myself about who knows my body or my work or my guilt about working or something and then I see that and I go okay, okay you can have another kid man you can do it.

Later, in class:

So I am doing write like you talk here with my students and whenever I do this particular exercise or technique or whatever you want to call it whenever I do it I kind of marvel at how difficult it is like it’s really hard to write how you talk because talking and writing are two different things and can you talk like you write? I mean okay this is what I think I mean that talking sometimes well it’s like it’s really unedited and you can’t go back and erase where as with writing you can you can sculpt and mold the words to sound exactly like you want and with talking you can’t so a big part of this is to not necessarily go back and change but to just to go slow you know slow down and let the mind do it’s thought thing or thinking and then take the thought s and like convert the thoughts into speech but speech on paper?

What the hell am I talking about? Anyway, what do I want to tell you, reader person? Funny about WLYT is that I am supposed to be writing like I talk and kind of in a way that shows some kind of connecting or communicating with another person and yet I can’t really ask questions with the other person, right? Well maybe I can if the other person I am talking to is me. Okay that’s what I am going to do right now.

So, Han, what’s up? How’s things?

Well, I have this f-ing sinus infection still. I mean I went to the specialist guys and he was really nice and thorough and it wasn’t bad or anything he told me stuff about my sinuses and deviated septum, which is pretty common and he said basically that I seem to be ion the mend and if after this round of meds I feel like crap again I should come in fro a CAT scan and I guess go onto a more intense approach. He also totally told me to do the Sudafed thing that that will open me up and I was like oh man that stiff made me loopy….

So yeah I have this whole sinus thing but I feel better I think it sucked though being sick my taste, like my taste buds, you know and my body feel all weird you know.

So what else Han…you got the sinus stuff and everything what else is going on?

It’s weird to sit here and just tell you all this welll content or whatever, you know cause some of it when I tell you sounds so irrelevant like not important I feel like I am not telling you stuff that I need to get off my chest.

Like what?

I don’t’ know. I am sad about Dad still. It’s duller and less intense. It’s more faraway but I want I guess I just miss him and like have moments of like guilt or something where I just wish I could reach out and be like connected and feel good around him and like maybe I guess I wonder if this, this disconnect like how much of it is my fault….but then I go down the guilt lane which like does this weird thing to me…Guilt, bam, resentment, bam, FUCK YOU, bam, anger. Operating out of guilt NEVER EVER like works as in works for me to feel better or more relieved which quite frankly I want to feel in the moments hat the guilt seizes me.

Am I making any sense?

Yeah, I think I mean I think what you are saying is that the guilt you sometimes feel about your Dad and the disconnect you have with him, like that guilt doesn’t motivate you it’s like this: I feel guilty…Okay, let me go do the thing I feel guilty about…then you may do the thing and wind up not feeling relieved of the guilt so then you’re pissed because a you didn’t get rid f the guilt and b you didn’t want to do the thing anyway.

Let’s talk about that thing.

Okay, the thing is call him, ask him if he wants to go for dinner or come over and have dinner, be like connected like we used to be with dinners and hanging out long ago we used to talk these great power walks…when I think about doing that I just feel like weird and guilty and well it seems like it’s impossible.

I guess what I understand is that I miss the past with my father but I don’t really see the past fitting into the present. But I feel guilty about that. I suddenly want to email him. Just a hello.

Well I just stopped and emailed him and I felt okay it felt stilted a little but I guess well shit now I feel weird like what the hell was that…why did I email him? Where did it come from is it guilt? Shit.