Growing Up

To watch a child grow up is to nurture a tender pocket of beating flesh into a conscious willful being.

To watch a child grow is to know the softest spots in a person and notice how these areas harden in response to the world.

To watch a child grow is to see how quickly life blossoms and transforms. 

To watch a child grow is to touch sweetness and know it intimately, only to let it go. 

To watch a child grow is to witness the expansion of knowledge and the sponge that soaks it up and squeezes it out in a conglomerated form.

To watch a child grow is to hold space for beautiful messes and wrong turns, sacrifices both expected and unexpected.

To watch a child grow is to unfold the folded pieces of your heart and write new messages on the inside.

To watch a child grow is to hear the whisper of the future as it echoes off the present.

To watch a child grow is to see how life arranges and re-arranges itself around the fiery light of love.

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Kaleidoscope

My girls need me.

They need me to pay attention, soothe, be steadfast.

But I am erratic.

My attention is scattered in piles like fallen leaves in the autumn.

Cayenne crimson, turmeric orange, ginger yellow.

The colors of my temper, spicy like the evil twin

who lives somewhere in my head not heart.

The earth spins and the leaves die and

emotions run like wild horses and

no one can control any of it.

I see it in my daughter.

Four years-old with emotions loud as a train wreck.

She opens up her heart when its bursting and

spills her frustrations all over the universe.

Like fallen leaves in the autumn.

More than I am angry I am glad

She expresses herself with the freedom of a person who is safe.

Wild horses do not thrive in cages or in crowds.

But in wide open spaces

our emotions have room to dance and turn

an ever-shifting kaleidoscope

its beauty a product of all the colors.

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Unfurling

She opens to this plane of being

Unfurling unfolding uncurling

Like the spiral of hair on the crown of her head

She stretches her limbs longer today than yesterday

Grabbing and kicking at an understanding

Of what it means to exist

Here and now.

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Shadow side of sweetness

Opening to what isThe shadow side of sweetness The flaws beneath An impeccable surface Smooth to the sight But not to the touch.

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Birthday Party

Written for Tipsy Lit Prompted: describe a family tradition that has changed over time. Mother bakes a cake and the children play games in the great outdoors. Maybe they sing, maybe they have candles, maybe they don't. Gifts are bestowed upon little dimpled Johnny, the birthday boy, gifts that are handmade with care. A bear knit by grandma. A pretty picture by sister. A picture book by best friend. Flowers from mother's garden. A car built by father out of wood. A car built by brother out of sticks and sweets. This was a good old-fashioned birthday party.

Johnny is now Grandpa John. Allison, his granddaughter, also has her birthday parties at home. Her mother hires a professional party decorator to impress the adults and her father pays a magician to mystify the children. Because children need to be entertained. They suck on lollipops and juice boxes and when her mother brings out the buttercream cupcakes nearly the size of Allison's head, cacophony breaks loose. Every classmate and old friend and cousin within reasonable driving distance runs at top speed in a different direction. But the parents are on their seventh bottle of champagne by then, so they giggle and chatter on.

It's a party for everyone! Everyone but Grandpa John who sits in the corner with his hearing aid turned down, observing the madness with amused, grateful eyes. When Allison finally sits before the piles of shiny gifts, she is so high and happy that she barely stops to look at each present she opens. Her friends, on the other hand, don't hesitate to put the gifts to good use.

When the last one has been opened, the exodus begins. Hugs and high fives and coats and extra cupcakes shoved out the door. Wrapping paper litters the floor like a rainbow-colored blizzard. Little Allison falls asleep upon the snowflakes, lips and cheeks red as cherries.

Rainbows

In response to this week's Tipsy Lit prompt: write about an adult topic seen through a child’s eyes.

When the sun beamed its mustard face through the window, Tanner could squint his eyes and see a rainbow swaying in his Mommy’s mirror, smiling at him like the man in the sweet shop. His neighbor lady, Dawn, said good things always followed a rainbow. She wore messy rainbows on her clothes every day. She made them herself, and she made one for Tanner, too. 

“Ugh. Do you have to wear that shirt? It’s so hippie-dippy,” said his Mommy, her voice scrunched. Mommy hated Dawn, but she still let Tanner fall asleep on Dawn’s couch every night, scratchy and moldy, cartoons fading into dreams. 

Tanner’s Mommy didn’t work all day like other mommies. She smoked her special sticks and painted her toe nails pretty and yelled at Ricki Lake and made snickerdoodle cookies. Her friends came over sometimes and they drank from tall brown bottles in between kissing on the mouth. They kissed like their tongues tasted of custard, or something else you couldn't stop tasting. Tanner felt funny on the underside of his tummy when they panted and licked like the stray puppies who rolled around the neighborhood. Sometimes his Mommy gave him a lollipop and changed the TV to cartoons and took her friend by the fingers.

“Now be a good boy while Mommy has grown up time, okay?”

“What’s grown up time, Mommy?” 

“It’s when we talk about grown up things.”

“What are grown up things?”

“I’ll tell you when you’re older.”

The men smiled big yucky smiles, their teeth sharp as the big bad wolf, while she ruffled his hair and winked one eye. He listened for the click, the signal she’d pushed in the lock, and then he pressed his ear against the door and listened for grown up things. But they didn’t talk. They jumped on the bed and Mommy made sounds like she was eating a box of chocolates or slipping into a bubbly bath.

Sometimes Tanner tip toed back to the TV like a good boy and sometimes he walked down the street slow as a tortoise, hunting for friends that didn’t want to be caught. He offered a freckled girl on a strawberry bicycle a lick of his lollipop one day.

"It's strawberry! You'll love it!"

"Gross!” she screamed, pedaling away, calling for her daddy. Tanner wished he could call for his daddy, but he already knew that no one would come.

Mommy’s friends always left before dinner. She cut hot dogs into octopuses and baked chicken into dinosaurs. He drank big boy milk and she gulped purple mommy juice and they smashed their glasses together and said “cheers!” After dinner, she packed up her big black bag with underwear and sparkly shoes and a funny wig. He liked the long yellow one best because it turned Mommy into Rapunzel. Mommy loved to be beautiful, she said it felt like she’d captured the stars in her pocket.

At work, she twirled on a stage, and she did it so nicely, like a fairy princess, that people gave her money. Whenever Tanner asked her to dance for him, she grabbed his hands and they spun around the living room until they fell to the ground in a happy pile.

He tried to wait up for her always, but his eyelids grew heavy as rain clouds. Always. When the stage set her free, she carried him from Dawn’s couch to his bed so that he awoke in a different place than he’d fallen asleep. He loved waking up in his own little bed, counting the cars on his bed sheets.  

But one morning, he woke up on Dawn’s couch and it felt like the world had cracked open for a one-eyed hairy monster to crawl out. It chewed up his brains and left him dead but alive and itchy. Dawn’s face, round as the full moon, appeared before his nose, asking him if he wanted rainbow loops or frosted flakes for breakfast.

“I want Mommy.”

“Well I'm not sure where she’s at, little guy.”

image credit: themusicreunion.com

Prank Caller

For this week’s prompt at Tipsy Lit, we are to write about insanity. What would push your character over the edge? How would they snap? Is it a one time, violent snap and then return to sanity or do they cross over forever? What does that look like? Do they know they’re crazy? I’ve learned to adapt to my mother’s quirks. She doesn’t attend parent-teacher conferences without Jasper the guinea pig peaking out of her carpet bag. My teachers look at me a bit differently after they've met my mother. She dyes her hair a different color on the first of every month, hues of copper and sunshine and mahogany, because she believes it keeps others from recognizing her. Never mind that she has worn the same obtrusive floppy hat and cat-eye sunglasses and shade of Revlon lipstick (burnt sienna) for longer than it takes to turn over every cell in the body.

She lists her occupation as “Mother” although I fit the role better than she does. I cook the spaghetti and clean behind my own ears and forge her signature to pay the bills and intercept the phone calls. After she got arrested last year for too many prank calls to the 911 operator, I started locking up the telephone. She hurled a crystal vase against the wall the first time I did it, but I scurried out the front door by the time it shattered like an airplane crashing. She never mentioned the phone again.

I wish I could say that something happened to make her this way, and I suppose it had to be a lost chapter of her childhood, something she will never admit. Because her photo albums tell a different story. She led a privileged life, a girlhood of equestrian endeavors and private schools and holidays in the Mediterranean. She achieved her first expulsion at my age (thirteen and a half) when she walked through the halls of her prep school naked as a newborn.

These days, from what I can tell, she devotes her life to stretching. She calls the yoga mat her sacred space. She can twist her limbs into a pretzel and she can sit cross-legged all day long. I bet she was sitting cross-legged, looking zen as a Buddhist priest, when she made those phone calls.

Sometimes I hate her. When I tell her so, she threatens to jump off of the Aurora bridge. I know she would do it. It's too easy to close my eyes and see her broken body flattened in a parking lot, human flesh turned to red paint. She says I’m her only reason for living. And so I have learned to swallow my hatred when I feel it, blistering my heart instead of my mother's. I can’t help but love her. It’s like an addiction.

Photo credit: mikecogh via Compfight cc

Ramona the Witch

Written for Trifecta.  "When you die, you will come back as a snake," said the strange new girl with strawberry hair and oriental eyes, as if she were casting a spell on my brother while we waited under crispy red trees for the school bus. Ramona had moved in with her grandmother in July and she wore only black, even on the stickiest summer days while the rest of us were up to our chins in the community swimming pool.

My brother, Chase, vexed Ramona by claiming that Mrs. Augustine was not her real grandma. Ramona spent the whole bus ride staring at Chase, giving him an eye so evil my mother would have covered his buzzed blonde head with a blanket. She was superstitious about things like that.

Ramona didn't have one friend. She stalked my brother at recess, watching him like a cat waiting to pounce. Sometimes I didn't notice it was my turn on the monkey bars because I was busy watching her watching him.

One morning, when my breath cut the fog, Chase asked Ramona to stop staring at him. She whispered, "never," and goosebumps prickled the back of my neck. I wanted to confess our troubles to mother, but Chase forbade me. He believed in courage over weakness, silence over scandal.

On Halloween, Chase dressed up as death and I turned into a black cat, whiskers and all. We begged mother to let us go trick-or-treating on our own. She walked and we needed to run. We wanted more candy than houses in our neighborhood. We wanted to hedge our childhood with sugar. Even then, we sensed it would be over soon.

The first thing the driver saw was a black cat in the road. Not me, but a real black cat. She swerved to avoid it, like pulling your hand out of boiling water. The last thing she saw was a skeleton flying through her windshield. A little boy, wearing all black and white bones.

Silk

Written for Trifecta. He squints because he is nervous, examining the silk sweater, which is finer than white sand. Usually, he judges silk only by touch. The eyes of a saleswoman rest on his back with intention. God made him a thief, but at least he can trust his intuition. He sets down the shopping bag and glides to a rack of silk dresses, rubbing the slippery fabric between his thumb and middle finger. Underneath his designer jeans, he wears three pairs of silk boxers.

The first time he discovered silk, his parents were on a cruise in the Bahamas. He'd woken up minutes before sunrise and padded into their room while the nanny slept. At five years old, his mother's dresser held treasures more precious than the doctor's trove of lollipops, comic books and plastic horses. He rifled through her top drawer, inspecting each item as if looking for flaws.

At first, his favorite was a thick, shapely bra, red and lacy. He wanted to take it into bed and cuddle with it, he didn't know why. Then he found the silk underwear, which he did take back to bed, rubbing the material between his thumb and middle finger until he fell asleep. When the nanny found him in bed with his mother's lingerie, he didn't know to feel uneasy. But after she scolded him, he did.

At age eleven, he stole an eggplant-colored silk robe for his mother. She thanked him, but never wore it, so he took it from the hook in her bathroom and threw it under his bed. He would never give her another gift. At 17, he opened a shop on eBay selling silk items. He got $75 for the eggplant-colored robe. At 20, he is richer than all of his friends, including the ones who work in construction.

The saleswoman continues to watch him, so he catches her eye and asks for a fitting room. When she turns her back, he disappears.