Not an Iron-Maiden

I am a writer & an artist. I am a scrapbooker, an interior designer & decorator, an architect. I am innovative, creative & resourceful.

I am also a wife & a mother. A mother who is doing the best for her children whether they think so or not. I break quarrels, I make meals, I break more quarrels. I attempt the impossible- not climbing Everest, but working towards peace amongst siblings. Amongst all of us. I am both judge & jury. I bake & cook & clean. I launder everyones’ dirty underwear, stinky socks &- yes I have to touch them.

I analyze aches & pains, & determine which need a doctor & which need a bandaid. I pamper broken limbs. I defy & banish viruses & I attempt to dry tears & make everything all right again whether it is or not. I straighten out misunderstanding. I try to teach mutual respect. I try to channel my kids, not change them. To teach them how to think for themselves, figure things out, make decisions.

I know the importance of being a good listener. I learn about pokemon, bionicles, hermit crabs, sports. Then I know & understand my children & their hobbies. I root for their team games, whether I can be there or not. I keep an open & inviting house for all their collective friends, who feel at home here, welcome.

I try always to see the other side of the story & also to teach my children to do this. I love them & cry when they are hurt physically or emotionally. I mourn over their acne troubles, their bad hair days, their teacher issues, their stupid homework assignments. I would keep them from suffering if it were possible. From the troubles with ‘friends’, siblings, etc.

I am also a dog keeper & trainer. I chase them out of neighbors yards, out of the horse pastures with manure. I lose sleep whelping pups. I wipe up cat barf & dog pee. I clean fish & newt tanks. I allow jars of frogs & tadpoles on my kitchen counters. I rid the house of spiders & flies, squish ants & beetles. And I don’t freak out when the garter snake gets loose never to be found again.

I am a go between. From daughters to husband & back again, trying to unite (or at least remove explosives) from two foreign objects. The one can’t imagine that Dad was ever a kid- he ‘doesn’t know about anything’. The other doesn’t get that teen daughters can’t be responsible for every word they utter. I tell Dad to read between the lines. Or I attempt to translate for him the things his daughters & sometimes his sons say.

And at the same time, I do not want to burden them with my feelings of inadequacy, or the fact that I have feelings too. Feelings that get hurt. Days that are difficult. I am not an ironmaiden standing strong and immobile, & yet I feel I should be.

I try to be an example, but I am not infallible. I have the same flesh as anyone, the same foibles. But my bottom-of-the-heart desire is to do the best for my family, in spite of that & health issues. Even if they don’t see it. Or remember it.

And no matter what I always love them to absolute bits & pieces—my family, my life. In everything, out of everything, I like them & I love them for who they are.

Minotaur in an Egg

I’ve been given cause to reflect recently. That four letter word-Life. Ironic that its counterpart isn’t the four-letter one, for all we treat it like hot embers.

I came across an art illustration of a sun, deep yolk-yellow, rising above a sea in between two cleanly broken halves of an egg. Sun in the background, eggshell to each side with the sea pouring gently forwards between them gradually sinking into the sand.

The egg breaks, but the sun rises even while the liquid sinks, lost… So the picture says. Do we believe?

It’s disturbingly cliché to say life goes on.
That sinking liquid throws us for a loop so big we don’t know how to deal, how to react, how to go on.
Not the sort of thing we get much experience with on the average. Not the sort we want to have experience with.
It’s all uncharted paths, strange streets, foreign highways. And no one knows that until we get there & find it’s a flipping, overgrown labyrinth, complete with a starving minotaur at the whirling epicentre.

It’s not wrong to seek isolation. To rant and rave inside one’s head, or practice breathing exercises, also in our own space.
It’s not wrong to pound one’s pillow until the feathers fly, or simply soak it with tears.
It’s not wrong to scream, yell, kick, nor to just subsist in a silent haze.
It isn’t even wrong to take it lightly on the surface.

The only wrong would be to feel the world’s most dangerous words ‘I don’t care.’
The only other wrong, to play ostrich, instead of, well, allowing ourselves to be lead wherever we’re taken and learning on the way. Learning for ourselves and all the other lives being touched in the same way. Here, accusations towards ourselves or others, selfishness, and regrets must have no place.

That’s the sinking egg-white side of it.

But we need to find balance and we do well to think on this:

The rising yolk, the sun, well, it is rising. To greater heights, to greater freedom, to something so much better.
The substance of things hoped for…the evidence of things not seen. Recompense for a life being conscientiously and caringly lived.
Maybe–just a thought, quickly dismissed, forgotten, unclaimed–we’re almost envious. And would do well to follow such a life.

No matter what, the word ‘easy’ has no place anywhere here. But maybe peace can.
Momentarily, just one thing is clear for me. I have a manuscript to finish.

Someone special needs to read it before her minotaur appears.

http://vladimirkush.com/sunrise-by-the-ocean