"Our Love Is Not A Victory March. It Is A Cold And A Broken Hallelujah."

I was driving down the road this morning, with the kids in the back, on my way to Cost Co. First of the month, pay day, Cost Co. That's how it goes. And I was struck by a thought. John Steinbeck has a quote. I've gone searching for it. I can't find it. I think its in "Travels With Charley" but I've read so many of his books that his words have shaken loose from their titles in my mind. They float, aren't easily pressed back into their proper jackets. This quote is about youth and decadence. How youth thinks it invented excess, with every generation convinced they party in the heights and wallow in degradation previous generations just can't fathom. I love it all the more that it was written in the early 1960s. (I think, unless it was written much earlier, which would make it even more poignant.)

Any how I had a corollary thought and it struck me while the Dixie Chicks were singing and we were hitting 65mph on a long smooth highway. All Calm, All Bright, but suddenly hit by lightening from inside: The children may never bring their deepest problems to me, out of shame, out of fear, out of a belief that I could never truly understand them. Isn't that how it goes, generationally? Or is that just how it worked in my family? Either way, I want better for my kids, and for my relationship with them. But how?

And I started a mental blog post right there, as I so often do now. And this is a beautiful thing for my inner landscape. Blog posting in my mind gets me thinking more deeply about my real life. And, at the same time, it pulls me a step back so I can see it better. Which, by the way, is similar to my reasons for exhuming my old 1989 Cannon Film camera and loading it with black and white film. Same process, different medium. Nice analogy about blacks, whites, and greys as you mentally flip the "real" image into the one you hope you are capturing with your adjusted fstops and film speeds and lens lengths.... will you end up telling the truth, will it matter? Does it make you a better mother in the process, or a mother more adept at hiding?

So in my car there, I started mentally flipping through snap shots of myself through my life. Proving to myself that there is Nothing the children can't bring me. I have been through most of it already. I started thinking how pictures tell the truth, but often in secret or unexpected or accidental ways. Also, they obscure the truth poignantly, painfully, poetically. When holding the photo and all is known, well... its art. Could that help the children one day? Could this blog?

Here is a picture of me down by the lake at 6 years old with no shirt on, completely aware that my father valued something called beauty in women, which seemed to be all he valued in women. Was I beautiful enough and did it help that my shirt was off? Photo #1 we'll call it. tags: gender fucked hidden tag: adult misery, where is my mother?

Photo #2 Me with my family standing at the edge of a field of sunflowers, red bandanna in my hair, I'm 10. We are on our biggest vacation ever, touring the west. tag: isolation, invisibility hidden tag: adultery, impending divorce

Photo #3 (Its so much better if you can actually see the real photo. I searched Cost Co for a decent scanner. Maybe one day...) Me at 13 in my huge Micky Mouse tshirt hanging out with the college guys who rent the bedroom next to mine. Aren't they handsome? Don't they look like fun? tag: begin puberty hidden tag: child abuse, rape, introduction to alcohol, where is my mother?

Photo #4 Me in high school leaning against my cool car, a white Pinto station wagon painted with zebra stripes. Jealous? You should be. That car was badass! tag: pregnant

Photo #5 Me and my best friend in a hammock at 20 years old. Do you see how beautiful we are? She long brown hair, me long blond, we are achingly beautiful. tag: thought beauty mattered, we are the party hidden tag: heroin, lsd, more alcohol, addiction

Photo #6 Pick one, there are many. tag: more rape, more addiction, more abortion, dropping out, poverty, AIDS, redneck solace, lost hidden tag: voicelessness, where is my air?, meet my therapist

I'm getting older now. I'm 26, I've met my future husband. Things start looking up. We begin a climb together, up to a safer more loving place. Do not mistake how hard we have to climb. We start a family. Years later we look so normal. People are jealous of me and my beautiful normal looking life. My kids see me only as their mother. And now we have a circle.

Because, I realised, all you can say is, "You can tell me anything." And, "There is nothing you can't say to me." And, "We are your parents, we are here to help you." Some kids actually hear that, do they? Who turns to their mother for help? Who could believe that I, look at this picture of me now, that I could understand that your best friend is already smoking, or you can't understand why the sky keeps falling down? The kids won't, I fear.

But here on the blog, I can make it known. Waiting here to be found, analysed, criticised, reevaluated. Fixed here like a photo whose meaning changes over time, whose value changes over time, where what is unsaid is as important as what is said.

And in the mean time, it turns out, this is about me. And my other blogging friends, and mothers having a WAY TO CONNECT. I pluck a strand of this web, and vibrations are felt somewhere else. I am not invisible and I am not unheard. And I see the other mother's too. It means so much to me, this community and visibility and mattering. This capturing and fixing. This muddling.

And that, Regularmom, is my response to your meme. I blog so I can breath, so I can connect with women like you. So I capture these moments and thoughts. So I can digress, not really answering the actual questions, and so we can all muddle through together. One day, this may mean something to the children. But for now, I finally realise, it means so much to me.

I'm not even sure what I started out to say or if it got said. And I don't care. Finally, I LOVE the freedom of the medium. It makes me a better person. And that makes me a better mother.