I sit here and as I learn to look back out of the window my hair brushes the top of my underpants. It's so long. And heavy. It's growing like a wild thing. Without any help on my part (kinda like kids). I keep thinking I'll get it cut... and then never do (so not exactly like kids). My dd tell me she wants hers 'all the way down her back' like mine. In reality she currently has the shortest hair in the family, fine and flimsy. But she has time.
Everyone likes to say that kids say the funniest things. And they do. If you are their parent it's even more hilarious. Even when it's a cuss, like my dd muttering under her breathe as she dropped her scissors 'oh bollocks'. My boys think all bad men are.... burglars. Its' the most they can come up with. Thankfully. It's reinforced though, like what's the worst you see in a Disney film? Home Alone, the bad guys are.... burglars, in Beethoven it's yet more thieves in the form of dog hustlers. Kids must think jails are full of these guys with cunning eyes and unshaven faces, plotting on when they'll get out and come break into your house. Although to be fair it's hardly the job it once was I'd say. Instead of two burly men heaving a whopping TV from your front room electronic gadgets are so small a thief would be searching through every pocket in the house to find the minuscule loot, they'd be bored out of their brains by the time they found the ipod. I reckon burglars must be way down on the list of crime wannabes. In our town there is a police station. But in three years I have never seen it open (Tuesday? From 2.30 until 3pm you say?). This means with no one to report anything to we are actually a crime free town :) It's great. And fun. Nothing is a crime, pretty liberating (you wanna throw down some rubbish - well go ahead!). But it's also a small place where everyone seems to do the right thing. I saw an old lady drop something and running up to give it to her she said, 'keep it deary' without even looking to see what it was. How I wish I could say it had been a £50 note, alas, just a packet of Trebor Extra Strong. I threw them away, and someone ran up to say I had dropped something..... how long had those mints been circulating....? It's such an interesting town too. Can you tell? All these people just standing around looking to be helpful. Almost like Grimsville, or where ever it is Postman Pat lives. Bet there's no crime there either. My boys think Hoodies are the coolest thing ever. Not the actual clothing articles, but dodgy looking boys wearing them. My dh is old school and heads must be uncovered indoors so there's no chance for our boys to be Hoodies quite yet. With a sister keen to copy them I might have a tribe of such Hoodies out in town any day now, scaring the old ladies into submitting £50 notes quite willingly.
Did I mention I have a job? An actual paying one? I work weekends in the little deli in town. I have been doing it now for a good few weeks. I get a great discount and I am really loving my day away, meeting all of these new people, talking, talking about one of my favourites (that would be food). And getting paid. I'll post pics as and when I take some (maybe tomorrow). I am loving best the little old people who come in to buy four thin slices of salami, an orange and a bread roll, take half an hour, bring their dog, and leave without spending more than a £1 and took up half an hour of your time :) It's fab. It's a big part of their day and they leave looking happy. I like the serious looking folk who come in with their lists and ask very serious questions. I like that people cock their head to one side and ask your opinion. It's very humbling. I like the way that I realise I still add up on my fingers (and customers notice and don't seem to mind). I like that when I get home I smell of marinated garlic cloves, have a bag full of yummy food (tired feet) and my kids are really happy to see me :) It means the rest of the week I am much more tolerant and have newer, kinder seeing eyes.
The real topic of this blog post (it took me long enough to meander to it) was to be another fairy-drifty one about dreams. As was my last. That poem I wrote as my eyes flickered open. I hardly ever write down my night wanderings. I did here, remember? How can I have been writing this blog for so many years? And why? It puzzles me still. Why write about dreams? Why bother to remember them? What if they are so real, so vivid you have no choice but to remember?
I gather the bones of my life and shape them into a form that pleases me, like the old lady shaping adobe clay walls in the dessert, I scrape together the mud and straw and water, patting the walls of my life into shape. Remoulding, reshaping. Mending after a storm. Writing the odd bit here. My life crashes down from time to time and I hash it together again. Sometimes it turns out way better than before, or from what I ever imagined Sometimes it needs starting over a bit, reshaping even more than I thought. Writing down a dream is a bit like this. It's nonsense to most. But sometimes you get a glimpse of things and of yourself. It becomes another bone of your life. It's the way for me. My dreams erect little places within me that are very real. The people and faces and the times I have said to myself in a dream 'remember this! remember this! It can't be a dream, it's real!' The details, the shadows the lines along walls, mould, damp spots, creases in clothing, the way the sun slants, the sound of the foreign tongue in my ear, perfectly understood. And then usually I write nothing and the details drift away. Last night I said to someone (both unfamiliar but familiar) in my dream, oh god, I have been dreaming about you for so long, it's amazing that you are actually right here! It was. I stared and stared taking them in, the new lines on their faces, the colour of the skin, the different shapes of their clothing that I had never seen, the seams on their shirt sleeves... the speck of dirt near an eyebrow and touched their face and thought with relish of all the days to come now that they were here and I could enjoy their company. And I wake up. Different people, different faces, different languages. All familiar and so real. Odd and strange too. But normal. Used to be I'd write in detail of it - like here. Now it's the odd poem, everything condensed and I only need look and it's all remembered. It's a better way for me.
If it were just the details and the objects I'd be ok really.
I look around and see details in furnishings, in faces, I listen to other languages and return conversation in tongues I don't know of in my waking life. But it's the people that get me. The people that stick with me through the day, through another day sometimes. Their emotions.
Not just in my ordinary life (I'll get to that), but in dreams; this overlapping sensation of being able to see inside other peoples thoughts and feelings. To know things about them, know I know them but wake up and have no clue as to who they are. Not usually.
I am sensitive (ok, I know, but beyond the norm I think). I can see people's emotions like waves radiating from them in my daily life. I thought everyone felt this way. I used to be angry at my dh for not knowing my moods as I so thoroughly could see his. I thought it was a sign of him being uncaring. I recently realised that not everyone sees this way. It is strange. To think people are shut off, or maybe shut themselves off. I sit by the fire and stare, seeing logs burn from within and disintegrate. Things there that some people don't see, or choose to notice You might assume that from knowing things I act upon them in kindly ways. Often I don't. I see someone wants me to ask something or say something, I see they are a certain way and I choose not to respond. It's a form of power, the knowing and not doing. Does that make me seem mean? Maybe it does. Mostly though I act and sometimes I feel stretched thin. As a teen I took great pleasure in being and doing the opposite of what was wanted and needed from me by others. Trying so hard to reign in and control a tiny scrap of my life when in reality the adults around me pulled the shots. I don't think it made anyone happy. It's useful from a mama perspective. I have sympathy beyond the norm, I usually see that from the way other parents fail. Which isn't quite a nice way either to see ones self reflected. I can sympathise way more with children than with adults. Mainly because I can see their sense of powerlessness. Their wanting to do right, not knowing what it is or being able to in any case for one reason or another. Some see this as my 'letting them get away with it' what 'it' is' I fail to see. I suppose the 'it' is what the adult views as wrong behaviour. But changing behaviour only happens from within. Never through external harshness. And if it does happen that way there'll be a suffering consequence even more horrid further down the line. It's trying to empower them and help find solutions rather than withhold my affection until they do what I want them to do. Which is a sincerely fucked up way to look at children and their behaviour. No matter what angle I try to see it from, I cannot respect someone else who chooses to disrespect another human. Take away all of the ages differences and that's what it boils down to. Can you tell I am struggling here to comprehend things I see around me? Well I am. It's another bone of life which I gather and work out where to put in the constructions we make around ourselves.
I asked someone who knows about such things how I can protect myself from being bombarded and drained by other people's emotions. I liked what he said. I find it interesting to see that I picked a man to live with who is mostly a happy soul and makes little emotional demands on me (if any). Sometimes I see he needs, wants something from me and I don't respond because maybe he pissed me off earlier. But in that way it's not entirely a different sort or relationship than anyone else :)
The worst time ever, in this regard, was in labour with Felix. Not only were the emotions of those with me just pounding at me I could clearly read their thoughts and wishes and being so vulnerable it was unbearable. I welcomed the general anesthetic, just to escape them all. That heightened sense of knowing things and seeing things that I didn't want to was torture. I think some people, whirling dervish types strain and fast and chant and drum for days to get to this place of seeing and feeling. When it comes, unbidden, it's something else altogether. I know someone who had this all their childhood and would faint in large groups of people. They learned to shield themselves, to tune in and out. Like knowing a clock is ticking in the room, but knowing you don't have to listen and hear it, you can get on with other things. Unless of course you choose to tune in.
I don't think I am physic, or a mystic or any such thing. They are just random labels. I think most females I know are intuitive beyond what they might consider. Way more, they just choose to tune out. Always with women I sense it more. They know things but don't want to know. I know that feeling well. For once I am just letting it be. It's interesting. I get these pieces of amazingwashed-through-me realisations. They come more and more, like calm waves of pure truth. I am walking, like just this evening and staring at the sky and I know with every fibre that just to let things be is enough. It's a god way to live. We can make choices as they arrive at us, choosing the greater good, but other than that we strive to flow with life. It's as easy (and as hard) as that. But mostly easy. If a toddler wants to cut things up, find ways to let her do exactly that, meeting your needs for safety and not having your house snipped to tiny pieces and hers to snip away. If your son can't bear to share precious things, don't ask him to. Respect his need not to have to share right this minute. You are not fostering selfish behaviour, rather showing a huge amount of unwavering love and respect - it's ok for you to be you, you say. I trust you and the process by which it takes you as an individual to get to the point of comfort of sharing. If it takes a year then so be it. You can smile and say 'sorry he's not ready to share that, here have this instead! Or how about finding something so great to trade him with he might feel like sharing after all...' whatever, it ok. The message from the universe is always don't struggle: Don't fight what is. Here. Already. It's anti life to do so. What's here is here, right now, you can't change it by willing, or by force for any good outcome. Only create misery in every direction. That's anti life.
Some days I don't know if I live my life right. But when I tune into this.... I don't know what to call it, source? Tune into life it tell me to Let It Be. The Beatles really knew what they were on to with that song. Choices come and you make them, your life takes shape and direction and you are always in tune with that. It takes creativity and passion and open mindedness to change habits and culturally ingrained modes of our own behaviour but it can be done. I do it every day and I am stubborn donkey sometimes. Dreaming my dreams, letting them come and writing them down seem to be another part of soemthing I need to do, letting them be as they are, not pushing them away.
Amen. Getting off the soapbox. Totally enjoying re-reading Naomi Aldort's book Raising Children, raising ourselves. A highly recommended read by the way and is giving me much food for thought this week.
Anyone wanna come over for a cuppa and let me read your mind? Mwah-ha-ha. Just kidding. I cannot do that :)
By the way, wax crayon leaf rubbings look splendid with watercolour paints washed over.....
And I am still totally loving this song, it just gets better and better.
