Curses.

How do you tell someone that your depressed? The words don't even seem to fit right.

I'm doing my thing. I get up, help the kids, fold the laundry. I take responsibility and see it through (almost) all the time. OK. A lot of the time. And I'm doing all the things that are supposed to be hleping.

I'm afraid of what this would be if I weren't doing those things. Far, far wrose, I'm sure. I'd probably stop getting out of bed.

But what do you do when you're already doing all the right things, and it's getting worse anyway?

There are two of me. One of them just wants to lay in bed all day long. That one is getting louder.

Have you ever stared too long into something bright, then looked away? The white spot in your eyes stays with you, for awhile. Then it fades away and everything is fine again. That's how this depressive thing is supposed to work for me now. It's there, in my eyes, for a little while. Then fades away. But this spot just keeps growing.

I want to cry all the time. I don't hardly cry at all. I'm tired, but afraid that all of this will get worse and tomorrow will be the day I can't leave it behind and go about my business.

I don't want to let anyone down. I don't want to sink below the surface. I want to... just feel better. Just feel normal. I want the spot to fade away.

But I've been wanting that for awhile, and it's not working.

None of this makes much sense. That's how I feel. That's how the depression feels. Such a stupid word for this thing. So sanitized. So ordinary. I think I might be broken.

Not quite a late night ride.

After four years of not riding on a motorcycle, we've gotten back into a place where we can (and do) go out together. I don't drive a bike - I'm just a trusting passenger. Marc's been driving for 15 years or so. The new bike is great, the time together is better, and tonight it worth writing about. So here I go.

The ride is so smooth that even at 70 mph I feel like I could just step off the bike. It's kind of a scary feeling, knowing how momentum and gravity would grab a hold of me and shake me like a rag doll, flinging me around in a fit of discipline to my flight of fancy. I used to feel like I could just fling out my arms and the wind would take me. Somewhere not of my own making. Someplace new. I feel differently now, a bit more stupid and a bit more wise, and so now I know I'd have to step down to be so complacent.

Riding a motorcycle is an incredibly intimate thing. The bike we bought is a big one, and we sit tall - even with a regular pickup truck cab. As we move along, I feel like I can see everything, and nothing. It feels too awkward to lean around Marc to see the road ahead. Turning around seems foolhardy. But up, down, left or right - I see the faces of other motorists as they move themselves somewhere else. I see the billboards, the clouds, the building lights, the construction crews. And everyone moving, moving moving in their own place, with their own agenda, and all of us rolling on the same pavement to get there.

It's not just a visual thing, it's a physical thing. The motorcycle forces me into contact with Marc, our only barriers the protective gear we clad ourselves in. When we slow abruptly, our contact isn't even voluntary - it's all about the forces around us. I want to close my eyes and lay my head against his back but the helmet and my height are all wrong. And more than a physical thing I have to put myself into his sphere as he controls this expensive powerful machine that carts us both along.

Bigger than this, constant and ever changing, the wind. It rushes by calm but changing. As we shift, move around traffic, along the geography, it's constantly shifting. Through all my gear I can hear and feel the power of it. I can smell where it's been or where we've been. It's a sensory deluge, and calming in a strangely amazing way.

This experience, out there tonight, held something poetic. It's not always like this, it can't be. I don't think I could stand against the tide of such a siren song, if it were always like this. I'm not sure what made tonight so precise and I don't care to know - in my weakness, I would simply try to recapture it and face failure again and again. My heart wouldn't take such a beating.

I'm still learning how to balance life.

I've been struggling. This isn't news. This happens all the time. It remains true, however. I don't usually struggle quite so much this time of year - long, bright summer days are a good thing for me. I have a watch tan line. I even have a swim suit tan line, though it's faint. I'm getting out and trying to breathe in this time, save it up, store it away.

Maybe that's my problem. Perhaps storing this up just doesn't work.

I digress.

I made a list of things to do today. I didn't like my list; I was grumpy, with a headache, and an 18mo old with an attitude problem. I haven't been able to accomplish things today. Going forward in a slow stop-start, pausing my goals long enough to change a diaper or tell him (again!) to get off the table. Eventually, I just gave up.

We went upstairs to the big bed. We rolled and wrestled. He laughed until he was breathless. He would take a break and wave goodbye, to climb onto his rocking horse but he never stayed away long. We cuddled and hugged. Finally, he laid his head down on my arm while I stroked his back and his eyes drifted closed.

The 18mo old with an attitude is asleep, so I can go back to that dreaded to do list. And I will, because somebody has to do the laundry. But I'm adding "play with kid" to the list, because I should do that, too.

Literature, cellos, and dreams.

A long time ago, I fell in love with the idea of playing a cello. I'm pretty sure it comes out of a book I read a long time ago called "Midnight Hour Encores" by Bruce Brooks. It's a rite of passage tale, involving a VW van, a confident, smart aleck teenager, and a cross country adventure. The main character (the teen) is a music prodigy who plays the cello. It doesn't have to make a lot of sense. I just think that I can pinpoint my romantic vision of the cello to the reading of the book.

The thing is, learning a new instrument is often considered a young person's thing. Old dog, new tricks. Etc. And it's a huge commitment of time, energy, and concentration.

Most importantly, playing the cello has been a dream for a long time. The funny thing about dreams - especially the ones you've had for awhile - is that it's hard to actually live with them. If you pursue them they can be amazingly inspiring. They can also be heartbreaking.

So, today I took a deep breath and sought out a dream. I came home with a cello. I'm nervously excited. I don't know how this will go. But it was finally time to actually try.

Dinner with friends.

I should rename this blog "lamentations about my dead mother" to more accurately reflect the things I write about here. I would, but "Brambles" seems much more vague. Keeping my options open.

It's another post about mom. Or maybe it's just a post about me. Let's find out together, shall we?

Tonight I hosted a potluck dinner for a small, well loved group of folks. The official theme was "home cooking" - interpretation left to each individual. When I hear that phrase, my mind goes to the food I ate as a child; the smells, textures, flavors of a daily life where I still rode a bicycle almost every day in summer and didn't mind the sticky residue from watermelon. I go back to being a kid and the magic of dinnertime. In my head, it is magical. I'm sure I've painted over it and gifted a romance to the picture that doesn't really exist. I understand the truth of this but it has become my reality - I don't remember anything else.

Part of the magic is that many of the foods I associate with my childhood are not foods I eat now with any regularity - or at all. A common meal would be pan fried breaded pork chops with mashed potatoes, canned vegetable, and (for my mother) a few fresh green onions on the side. We didn't eat much fruit but we ate a lot of canned veggies and fried food. Mom wasn't trying to set bad examples or give our adult selves something to be horrified about - this was the food she ate as a child, that she had learned to prepare, that she knew and was comfortable with. This was Home Cooking at it's slightly southern best. As an adult, I realize the nutritional pitfalls of my childhood. As a mom, I work really hard to avoid serving those pitfalls up to my kids. We eat fresh or frozen veggies, a lot of fresh fruit in all varieties, not so much fried food. I'm not trying to pull a superiority thing - the bare fact is that I work hard to compose meals for my family that are substantially better nutritionally than the meals I ate as a child.

But (in my head, or more importantly, to my palette) meatloaf should still have mashed potatoes, spaghetti begs for hash browns, and eggs are best fried over easy in bacon grease. I digress.

"Home cooking" was tonight's theme, and it got me thinking about the flavors of my childhood. I wasn't thrilled to bring those out tonight (see paragraph above about change). So I started thinking about my version of home cooking. What will my children remember eating years from now? What flavors, textures, combinations will come back to them when they're busying about their own kitchens? Will the food I give them now, in these years, be something they remember with fondness or horror? Will they romanticize their childhood home cooked meals, or remember them accurately? Does it matter?

I believe it does matter. Food is a key component to our existence. When I think of cornbread, I think of Mom's cast iron skillet, sizzling with butter. When I think of Christmas, I can see Mom bustling around the kitchen, wearing bells at her ears, singing carols and baking cookies. Food is the thread that holds us together in deep, unknown ways - ways that surprise us, comfort us, carry us through. Ask anyone, and everyone can tell you a food story. It might be happy or sad, exciting, tragic, or dull. But it's their story, rooted in sustenance.

To wrap up a bit of the story, I ended up fixing spaghetti for tonight's home cooking contribution. It's the first thing I started cooking from scratch. Many years, I even spend two days sweating in the kitchen to churn out quart after quart of home made marinara sauce for the pantry. It's become my comfortable, known, flavorful home cooked meal. I skipped the hash browns that accompanied my childhood spaghetti - like always -but if I'd had potatoes I might have made them just tonight, as an homage to being a kid.

I guess this really isn't so much about Mom as it is about me. Frankly, I'm a bit surprised. I was expecting something more focused on the past, not this sort of wandering through to the present.

If I'm going down, I might as well go down in a blaze. No, glory doesn't have a thing to do with it.

Almost six months ago I was seized by a crazy moment of inspiration and got down the beginnings of a story, written specifically for (and sort of about) my kids. I was all afire about the thing, really excited about how the first run sounded. It needed work but I felt like the bones of the tale was there and workable. Unfortunately, I ran out of work time on it. Like so many things, it fell victim to a lack of time, focus, and energy.

And now I can't find the stupid thing.

I'm so frustrated. I'm resisting the urge to fill the recycle bin with things that seem useless and needless right now - like the stack of notebooks full of my other writing. I cannot believe how many random bits of poetry are hidden here, there, everywhere. And I'm stunned at how awful it all is.

Yeah, sure. I used to write poetry. But none of it was very good, none of it is something that I'm proud of, and none of it is really something anyone wants to read. That's how it all feels right now. I cannot imagine what I used to think I was doing or why. Or why I thought anyone would want to read it.

All of this happening on a day when I feel insane. Almost physically shaking from the effort to be reasonable, calm, focused. In an earlier age, I would have gotten stinking drunk. In a more recent age, I would have gone to the store and bought cake and ice cream, with fresh cookies to tide me over on the drive home. Now, I just don't know what to do.

But burning all the old poetry is a really appealing plan of action.

This mom thing keeps me thoughtful.

In the last two weeks, my three year old has made shocking strides. His vocabulary has exploded. His maturity has lept ahead. He's potty trained. He's tall. He's sensitive and thoughtful. He's also crazy, happy, and now verbalizes how he's feeling.

I have to keep reminding myself that the poor kid is still just three years old. I see him, and he feels older to me. Tonight, he talked about the reflection of the night light. That's the kind of thing he's noticing and commenting on.

It's not all good, though. My mind is fooling me and suddenly my expectations are a bit skewed. I reasonably explain that it's past bedtime and we can't read a book. In a classic three year old way, he covered his eyes and cried in disappointment. I admit, I somewhat impatiently put him into bed with ice cream smeared on his chin and tears in his eyes. I'd love to wake him, wipe his face, whisper a nighttime lullaby, and hug his warm sleepy three year old self. I'm going to endeavor to remember the sweet three year old tomorrow.

And read him a very good book.

The unexpected ones.

It's in the quiet moments, the unexpected ones, when all this catches up to me and brings me to my knees.
It's the defenseless nature of it, not knowing how or why it happens, missing all the signs and warnings.
I've become practiced at heading off the deflation when I feel it coming on but am still a hostage to these quiet times.
I have no idea where this is going and I think I've ceased to care.
Holding on, waiting for sunrise.

Weird. That's all.

I was driving down the highway distracted by things like my long to do list and the fact that it's my son's first birthday.

Hard to believe it's been a year.

This isn't about him, though. Birthdays are cool but at a year old he really doesn't get it. I'm good with that. When he's older, I'll sneak in birthday messages all day long. At a year old it's mostly just normal operating procedure.

So this is about my mom, instead. As I was tooling down the road, doing my thing, I realized that 14 years ago today the all important doctors changed her long term prognosis to terminal. This label changes everything. The approach to care is different. The waiting begins.

I could go on about the depressing and nasty way that I remember my mother's slow and painful death, but I've done that before and I'm not in the mood. Just accept it: it was bad.

By some weird coincidence we were near the cemetery where Mom is buried. I don't usually go there (actually, it's been almost a year and that was for my grandfather's graveside service). And if I do go, I don't take my kids. Mom never met my children and they have no connection to her. I talk about her when it's appropriate and I field questions when they come up. And those questions do come up - I've written about that before, too. But the cemetery, for me, is a random and odd place. It's a physical symbol, presence, of something so esoteric.

I'll never forget standing at the side of my mother's coffin, watching my 7 yr old brother let a bunch of bright pink helium balloons go, sending them to Heaven.

It seemed odd to avoid the cemetery, given the near nature of it and my thought process. So I pulled in and hauled all three kids out of the car. Ari asked about the people who's names are inscribed on the markers around Mom (I'm related to quite a few in those square feet surrounding her). Oliver just hung out and did his 1 yr old thing.

Xavier walked across the road and straightened the porcelain figurines someone had placed on a nearby marker. Then he came over and played trains on the top of Mom's granite stone. I let him. It seemed appropriate.

My mom was a short woman (barely 5 ft tall). She was quick to temper and held a grudge for years. She was a housewife. She drove a minivan. She was loving and passionate. She was a force of personality. Mom bounced through life. She came to all my sports games and speech competitions and high school plays. Mom was good and bad and back then, before being terminal, she was so alive. That's how I remember her. That's how I will always try to remember her.

Lost

I've ripped out my hair,
Sliced open my skin,
Given up my reformation.
Metaphorically, of course, because I don't
Do that Sort of Thing
Anymore.
But I did, before, and I miss it a little
Sometimes a lot
When the scream in my head drowns out everything else
And none of the new ways makes it quiet again.