Birthday List

"Time has left its remnants and qualities for me to use--my words piled up, my texts, my manuscripts, my loves." ~Allen Ginsberg (Howl and Other Poems)~

Lately, I have been thinking about what gets left behind...my thoughts caught up in debris and remainders, my heart far more empathetic towards the fragments than the wholes. Another year of my life has just been counted on the calendar. Since my last birthday, I've left the remnants of journals full of words piled up and several entire notebooks of poetry and prose, mostly fictional sketches. I read through the year's journals a week or so back and can see how raw I really am...how new and foreign this territory still is to me.

I have left behind motherhood as I knew and understood it...what it was: full-time, home-with-kids, able to contain the entire universe in my two arms, the dailiness of the routines, the predictability, the lifetimes spent in rocking chairs with babies in my lap. There was the physicality of mothering: the wiping noses and bathing fat Buddha babies in warm lavender-scented water, the tucking them into bed every single night and peeking in as they dreamed, the moon slung like a boomerang in the sky in perpetual return to me, to this, to us. Life was: days under trees on old threadbare quilts, reading and laughing, watching clouds. I stood awkwardly in countless parks, watching the clusters of moms who never forgot sunblock, juice and hand sanitizer...women who seemed like they'd planned their whole lives to end up there--right there--a cherubic junior self in the sandbox and a joy and seamlessness in their maternal skills I coveted. Motherhood didn't sneak up and surprise them as it did me.

I have left behind being the "center" for my children. There are whole weeks now I do not live with them. The mantle of mother is shed then for one of solitary woman. This past year has been the first time in my entire life I've lived alone: no parent, sibling, roommate, friend, partner or child...just me. The experiences, doubts and unknowns in my 30's are those most people have in their 20's. As usual, I'm running against the tides. Where the 20's are for self-discovery, restless mistakes and heartbreaking uncertainties, the 30's promise stability, marriage, pregnancies and then nights broken only by the low cries of infant longings.

But my 30's see me quite rootless--two moves in 11 months, preceded by almost a year of rotating in and out of what was "home" my whole life. My 30's had not a dream wedding but an ending so surprising and unexpected that there are still mornings I roll over in bed and instinctively look for him...as if those dozen years worth of mornings with his face as the first I saw are somehow encoded in my DNA. I notice pregnant women and smile like a wizened ancient grandmother. Technically, I could have more children if I chose to for years and years yet, but don't even bother mentioning that to my body, which has quietly filed that ripening curved lusciousness of heavy pregnancy away in the depths of memory.

Now, my nights are broken by churning thoughts. Weeks when my children are with me, I sneak into their room and check on them, their unguarded faces in sleep giving me glimpses of the babies they once were. Weeks when they are not, I open the door to the backyard and stand on the steps in my nightgown, searching for the moon and the silver silhouettes of trees in the dim light, as familiar to me as my own face in the mirror. Somehow, standing there, letting night touch my skin and studying the patterns of the ever-changing skyline, I feel my anxiety edge off. If this fails, as it sometimes does, I stagger to the kitchen table, strike a match to a cluster of white novena candles and move my pen across the page. Pushing ink like a needle into a vein, the narcotic effect of the words I leave behind, my one sure thing.

It is all there, spiraling across my journals in my jagged script. Ultimately, the writing I do now will have my final say in the future. The words will survive me, even if it is only my children who ever read any of them and puzzle through the fragments and relics of their mother's existence. It may reveal my darkness more than I'd like or it may just show them our common human heart...words live on the page, offering the fixed immutable reality of how it looked from where I stood, one final "I WAS HERE" graffitied across the world's immaculate face.

This year, though, I want to leave behind some memories to add into my notebooks and (like this amazing woman does each year and this beautiful one just did recently) I'm sharing my list of things to do before my next birthday here below. Here's to new things to write about:

1) Try sushi.
2) Spend a day on rollercoasters.
3) Cook at least one (real) meal per month and invite others to come and share it with me.
4) Finish my last book edits.
5) Get a new camera (crushing on several types at the moment).
6) Read 100 books (and jot down or blog responses).
7) Attend a workshop or a retreat.
8) Publish my work again like I used to.
9) Get monthly massage.
10) Volunteer to teach creative writing in the prison again (or in shelter or outreach program).
11) Take several trips.
12) Go here to see sideshow.
13) Take my oldest here, just us.
14) Go skiing.
15) Set up luxurious reading corner with a chair so comfortable I never want to get out of it.
16) Swim in the ocean at night.
17) Get my meditation practice back to what it was two years ago.
18) I'm definitely stealing Jeanine's Number 18.
19) Clarify what I want next with my education.
20) Take my son on one of the three visits he wants whether it is in the vein of astronomy, military or monster truck show.
21) Totally and unapologetically make out with someone under the stars.
22) Get a bike and ride it often.
23) Go camping.
24) Take my youngest to see a show or a play.
25) See live music whenever possible.
26) Re-learn Spanish.
27) Visit here for the first time in years and years.
28) Try to blog more regularly.
29) Talk to strangers. Often.
30) Show my wildies my old ice dancing skills at the rink.
31) Write some letters and postcards on gorgeous stationery.
32) Go out with the girls twice a month.
33) Knit lace.
34) Give another public reading of my work.
35) Let go, whenever possible, of any people (or things) not essential to my life or not contributing to my sense of joy.