musings of the season, or at least the morning.


i only get to use my current graphics server hpphoto.com: home for my blog for five more days...figgering just what i ought to do now. i haven't posted much anyway - haven't written much - haven't painted much...haven't done much.

thought a lot. :) read a little. connected, with bereft mothers and benefactors and friends, andy's here til next monday so i have reason to rejoice. my brother will be 50 tomorrow, my daughter-in-law is 29 today, and one of my two lifelong friends was 49 yesterday.

we don't talk about her birthday being the same as hitler's, or the anniversary of the day a high school in CO became a bloodbath of terror for staff and students and viewers [like me].

i'd run away from home the night before, and was spending the day in the motel room i'd run to. i walked rory to school and called my boss and gave him a synopsis of the previous night's events...leaving out the part where i'd been threatened with death almost nightly for the months preceding this move. i had gathered up rory, some clothes, and the work i'd brought home the night before after my sister called me from her home in WA and heard the terror and despair in my voice. she told me she was going to call the police.

i had been begging him daily to move back out. i wouldn't sleep with him, and tried to stay out of the bedroom where he would trap me with the malevolence of his countenance as he stood between me and the hallway beyond. we had had the same conversation so many times i was running out of energy to say anything at all. who was i? i sat at my computer and played online poker; i could not write around him, or on the computer, as he was a computer genius/professional who could and would find out everything that i did, said, or wrote on the computer.

1999, that was. five years ago now, and between then and today the greatest most debilitating tragedy a mother can know...yet, even now, i am leery about posting this. he has no name; that goes without saying. call him the fire, because he caught me on the rebound from a frying pan we'll call Dick.

anyhow. happy birthday marcia! something great did happen on april 20, too. love you



completely incongruent to the above picture of my lovely daughter bekah, here is a poem i wrote in 1996-1997, with the quote i like to preface it with:

Bitterness imprisons life; love releases it. Bitterness paralyzes life; love empowers it. Bitterness sours life; love sweetens it. Bitterness sickens life; love heals it. Bitterness blinds life; love anoints its eyes.
Harry Emerson Fosdick

Bitterness

So you will greet 40 tired and sweating
and sucking the love from your children
like some bizarrely reversed pregnancy -
And you will be, as ever,
alone

But you will not be grown-up, or graceful you
klutz of a slut you bad girl you.
You’ll be an ass, drunk and stupid
Or an old maid staring blankly at - what? why?
while the shrivel you spoke of
when still just a girl
destroys all your chances,
succumbs to the bitterness -

Oh you tried to swallow it -
You tried turning it loose
But it wound itself around you
like a python.

So finally you embraced it.
It was a man
any old man
Not the ONE man who could have redeemed it
Or kept it to himself!

Just like that you were quite, quite old.
Everything about you got tired and fat -
And you had lost so much caring
A crying kitten couldn’t move you
You could shrug at a newborn
As bitterness beamed expansively

© Barbara Bales 1995-2004 all rights reserved
- posted by barbara @ 4/21/2004 08:42:00 AM