{by Dera of Casablanca}

I’m driving home from Fiona’s school when she asks me this in a soft voice:

Fiona: “Mom? Did you ever like a boy when you were my age?”

Me: (thinking, “I loved boys in the womb. By seven, I was already over this dating thing and ready to settle down.”)

“Yeah, I think so.”

Fiona: “Were you ever afraid that he didn’t like you back?”

Me: (thinking, “There was little to no fear in my approach. Capture, seize, and conquer. Much easier.”)

“Sure. Is there a boy that you like?”

Fiona: (silence)

I adjust the rear-view mirror, and see the reddest face smiling back at me. I have my answer.

Me: “It’s okay. You don’t have to be embarrassed. Is it someone I know?”

Fiona: (nods with her face buried in her hands)

Me: “Fiona, do I have to guess every boy in our lives or are you going to tell me?”

Fiona: “I’ll give you a guess.”

Me: “A ‘hint’?”

{by Mary Lauren Weimer, My 3 Little Birds}

I almost didn’t go.

It was spitting Michigan sleet and I was tempted to change into sweatpants and curl up on my chair with dinner in my lap.

Sometimes, if I turned the antenna in just the right way, I could pick up Canadian channels. To me that sounded almost exotic–watching foreign television. But I’d worn a dress and heels to work, and all that wardrobe effort would have been wasted on another evening alone in my apartment if I didn’t venture out.

It was Ash Wednesday. I needed Lent like detox.

{Original posted at Alphabet Junkie}

I am flying down the highway that Ralph and I used to travel, groggy with humidity and third-shift obligations, on our early ay emm returns from work.

The sunroof is open, my window down, and my elbow is propped up on the door. My hand, fingers slightly splayed, is upright and barely cupped into the streaming wind. The air is moist and near-cold. I imagine it splintering through my palms and wrists, crucifying me. Crucifying me to this mountain.

Sometimes I think the red clay taste of this place, the sting of fire ants on naked toes, will never leave me.

Photo Credit

Double lines, broad expanse of fields to my left, chicken houses and horse trailers and apologetic farms to my right.

A caution light, a sign with a large, stark black + and I swing into a right turn, slowing significantly. A pebbly road paved with what I’ve always referred to as ‘gravelcrete’ is seated between trees that could masquerade as rows of the blackest of monoliths if only their bumpy tops did not give them away. The sky above is still impossibly blue, even though the sun took its’ leave of the horizon two hours ago. It is strewn with bruised indigo clouds that don’t even pretend to be fluffy. They are as flat and as stretched as the road before me.

{By Pauline Campos}

“It’s time to exercise, baby,” I call to Buttercup. “Did you want to play or workout with Mama?”‘

She’s in the playroom she has dubbed her “magical land,” but immediately joins me at my side and waits for the DVD to cue up. “Are we going to get healthy and strong?”

I smile. “Exactly.”

When I was a baby, my thighs were so chubby that one of my aunts used to eat them like drumsticks. It’s a story I heard often when I was growing up, usually told with the requisite giggles from my mother and a pinch on my legs from whomever else was within reach. I thinned out as I grew, but I never thought myself skinny. Instead, “big” was how I classified my body. “Big” because I was five feet tall at eight years old. The same height as my mother and almost every other adult woman in my family. “Big” as in not dainty with curves that snuck up on me when I was 12 and muscle definition that would have put me in the “athletic” category. But that word didn’t exist in the Spanglish craziness my family resided in. Instead, children were scolded for not finishing what was on their plate and reprimanded for needing to watch what they were eating, usually in the same breath.

I remember very clearly the day my father noticed my new set of hips. I weighed 156 pounds and stood 5’6” tall. I wore a size 10 and only now realize I only thought that was a bad thing because my mother never shut up about the size 6 she could still squeeze into after five kids. If I could wake up with that body today?

A’ye, M’ijita.

{by Amanda of Last Mom on Earth}

(photo source)

We went on a special date, just Louise and me. She crawled through the aisles of the bookstore and I slowly meandered behind her, reading passages from crisp, unspoiled novels I knew I wasn’t going to buy. Maybe someday.

She talks a lot, when she’s alone with me. She points to things and tells me about them in her funny, amazing language. When something surprises or delights her, her tiny hand flies to her mouth and she chews on her perfect little fingers.

We came home to an empty house and I sat a carton of blueberries on the floor between us. My hands were clumsy and imprecise, picking up toppling handfuls and eating them without discretion. Louise, with her dainty, pointed fingertips, thought carefully about each berry before she chose it with an attitude of satisfaction and ate it, all by itself, like it was the most special and singular blueberry on the planet.

So much thought and care goes into chewing and swallowing a single blueberry when you’re one years old.

{By Glennon of Momastery}

Last week I read A Million Little Pieces and this week I’m re-reading I Never Promised You a Rose Garden and The Bell Jar. All three are about mental illness . . . and so it’s been a theme for me, these past two weeks…insanity. In truth, it’s been a theme for me these past few decades.

I spent some time in a mental hospital during my senior year of high school. I’d been a horrible bulimic for eight years and therapy wasn’t helping, especially since I spent most of my therapy sessions discussing how fine I was and how lovely the weather was. And one day during my Senior Year, I ate too much at lunch, and I thought I was going to die. Because to me . . . full = death. But I couldn’t find a place to throw up. And so finally, right then and there, in the middle of the Senior Hallway, I decided I was not fine - not at all. And I walked into my guidance counselor’s office and I said: “Call my parents. I need to be hospitalized. I can’t handle anything. Someone needs to help me.”

{By Brian Sargent from Looky, Daddy!}

A few months ago, Kathryn spent a day collecting rocks. She collected maybe three dozen of them from around our neighborhood and placed them all on our porch. Most were small, only a few were bigger than my fist, but despite the fact that none of them looked in the slightest bit out of the ordinary to me, Kathryn told me she selected each one for a reason. Each one, she said, had something special, some unique quality that set it apart from the rest. So I sat down next to her on the top step of our front porch and she told me about them. She told me about each rock individually, asking me to recognize and confirm the differences that she saw, to affirm the uniqueness of her selections, and in doing so, affirm Kathryn herself. Affirm her uniqueness. It was one of those special moments a dad shares with his daughter if you define special moments by skull-bashing tedium.

Oh my god that girl uses a lot of words. And she just keeps using them and using them.

When Kathryn was younger, it was I who talked to her about everything. I filled our time together with a running monologue of anything I could think of. A lot of it was high-minded and ideological, like what she could be when she grew up or the proper response to handsome princes who might imagine her to be in need of rescuing, but much of it was just stuff I was saying to keep my brain from crusting over with the same dried shell of spit-up to which most of my clothes had already succumbed.

I told her about the water cycle and about social justice. I told her as much as I remembered from my philosophy classes, about Schopenhauer’s delightful pessimism and how the Platonic ideals were crap but they were important crap. I explained crock pots and told her the secret to my brisket dry rub. I told her words and phrases I knew from other languages. I told her there is magic in the world and she didn’t need to look any farther than a bottle of sunscreen for proof of it.

{By Brittany Gibbons, The Barefoot Foodie}

Have you ever been driving somewhere, and, before you know it, you’re there and you have no idea how you got there?

I haven’t been present for a while.

My body was here, and every so often, familiar words would escape from my mouth, but for months, my mind was somewhere else, and my heart was off laying in a mud puddle somewhere while someone poked at it with sticks.

I’m a cutter.

Not that kind.

With my brand of cutting, there is no visible blood. All the scars are internal.

I was never going to say anything. I was just going to cut. Bleed. Heal.

But, I wasn’t really healing. I wasn’t clotting.

I was gushing. Heavily. And, it was blocking me.

Everything just squatting on my frontal lobe. Making my words not work.

(I have no idea what your frontal lobe does. I’m not a professional doctor.)

{by Whit Honea of The Honea Express}

Inland was warmth and sunshine and days of summer stretching wearily. The coast, however, was 20 degrees cooler and worked in so many shades of gray. The sky fell into the sea and the waves rolled across my cold feet before running up the stairs to take their place at the end of the line. Clouds waited patiently.

The rocks in the ocean were the size of ships, and ships were the size of small birds flying off in the distance. There was a cave on the beach and in it sat a family around a campfire. Their dog ran free and happy, a green ball held tightly in its mouth.

She stopped in mid-sentence, her words lost beneath the beat of a tide rolling in. I hadn’t been listening. I was writing poems in my head as I am prone to do, and then promptly forgetting them as that requires much less effort than actually writing them down. Most of them were rubbish, but one may have been damn near perfect. I watched her watch the ground. She was brilliant against the sepia shore.

She bent down and picked a drop of red out of the surf-trodden sand. It was a ladybug, caked in grains and left for dead. Suddenly, the beach was alive with polka-dots in reds and yellows and the polka-dots were, in turn, covered in dots of their own. We sat on our knees in the sand and dug ladybug after ladybug from their collective coastline grave. Our shoes, which had long ago left our feet and become something meaningless to hold on to, became the soles of rebirth. It was on the bottom of my left flip-flop that one ladybug found breath and another was once again able to crawl. It was somewhere opposite where my big toe would be that a ladybug shook the sand from its wings and flew away home.

It seems that they live in the trees that tremble from the side of steep ocean cliffs, and when certain winds blow the way that certain winds do, the ladybugs are pulled from whatever life they have known and dropped without warning over deep waters and hungry fish. Assuming they don’t drown, are not eaten or lost at sea, they are marooned on beaches not 50 feet from the trees on which they started. But they are pounded with ebbs and flows, and they are forgotten amongst shells and bits of seaweed. All in all, it’s no way to treat a lady.

{By Danielle of Knotty Yarn}

School starts in two weeks. I could not be more thrilled.

I love school. More importantly, I love being a student. Having the undeniable permission to pay attention, soak in, look around, experience, and learn. I’m good at it.

Lately I’ve been reflecting on how I generally feel from day to day. It’s easy to sidestep talking about depression when you aren’t actually depressed. If you believe in hocus pocus, you fear that talking about it will bring that black fog back into your life. If you’re easily overwhelmed, you just want to focus on each day. If you’re medicated, you often don’t care to talk about depression, as long as you have relief from the physical effects of it.

If you’re all of these things, it’s hard to sit down and reflect your emotions via the written word.

I’m not depressed. I’m not experiencing anxiety from the monumental task of getting out of bed and looking each day in the eye. I’m not exhausted from insomnia, forced awake by the constant worry and sadness. I don’t curl up and weep in the shower, on the kitchen floor, in the car, in bed. I don’t unplug the phone, ignore email, forget friendships. I don’t look at babies and think “What a shame to bring that kid into this pitiful, bleak world”.

I haven’t thought about quietly, unobtrusively killing myself in nearly two years.

Yet when referencing depression, either internally or externally, the only thing most of us can think to say is that we suffer. We suffer from depression. How can I be suffering from depression when I’m not actually feeling depressed? It’s a linguistic accusation.

I no longer think of myself as someone who suffers from depression. I experience depression. I acknowledge that yeah, I have the chemical version of the devil’s advocate living in me all the time. While I hope that it won’t rear it’s ugly head ever again, there’s no way for me to be certain. Things that come naturally for most people require a lot of thought and internalizing for me. Sometimes I need medication to help me…to help me. Help me get going, help me get on, help me get through. I spend a lot of time kicking my brain’s ASS.

This last time around, I was able to turn my depression into the impetus for making a big, tangible life changing decision. I had to plug in the phone, answer the email, say “yes” when I wanted to say “no”, persist when I wanted to take a nap. It took a team of loving, dedicated people to give me back my life. To get me to a point where I could open up a world of options for myself, be brave enough to try something new, make connections and new friendships, rediscover my creative life.

I’m not suffering.

And I’m not merely alive.