Lush lights linger lightly on my legs.
Excess ecstasy jerks in my finger tips.
I have too much of myself.
I am smoldering.
My old jeans make juice from jam.
I’m going to take my face off
and dance with the band.
Please understand.
Month: July 2017
Weighty Matters
Lately I’m not totally happy with my weight. It isn’t that I want to be thin again. I don’t really. I’d rather eat what I want and be fluffy. I even like being fluffy. I think it suits me more than being skinny. I have disproportionately large breasts, so being skinny just makes me look a little weird in my opinion, like a snake that swallowed two watermelons. But I’d love to be about 20 pounds lighter. I’m definitely more than 20 pounds heavier than slim, but I’d like to lose 20 pounds. I was supremely happy with my weight at 175/180. I like plus size clothes, but I miss having the option to wear regular size clothes. I’m a size 18, so I’m one size too big to shop in regular departments. Gone are my days of shopping at Macy’s.
The problems are these: I like food, I’m on heavy psychiatric medication, I have hypothyroidism, and I cannot do my old favorite forms of exercise very much. I used to be really in to walking and for the past year or more I’ve been unable to really take a good long walk because of my problems with my foot – problems two foot surgeries have not fixed. Walking was my favorite form of exercise. I used to go on nightly one hour walks, with a little bit of running thrown in.
I need to find a new form of exercise. I’m thinking of swimming, but I don’t have a pool and it is time consuming to drive to the pool. Plus, the pool lap swimming hours don’t work with my schedule. I’d love a trampoline to jump on, but we are moving to military housing in January when we go to Colorado and I don’t think trampolines are allowed there – and it isn’t worth the money to buy one for just one summer and fall. And honestly, I’m not sure how much impact my foot can really take. My problem tends to be more with bending my foot than putting impact on it, but impact hurts too.
Then I think I could count calories again, but I don’t miss the days of my life where I counted calories. It was miserable. I don’t want food, or the lack of it, taking up that much space in my head. I don’t want to count everything I eat. Still, if I want to get back in to size 16s or 14s I need to eat less and move more.
Why does size matter? Why can’t they make the same clothes in all sizes? And why do I put this pressure on myself? Society tries to put pressure on me, but I don’t read fashion magazines anymore and I’m old enough to pay no mind to the tv, so I don’t know if that is where the pressure is coming from. My husband doesn’t put pressure on me and loves me the way I am.
Am I really unhappy with my weight or am I unhappy with something else? Sometimes unhappiness about other areas of myself manifests in unhappiness with my weight. Even when I was skinny I was miserable about my body because I was miserable about other things. So how do I separate my feelings about my body from my feelings about other things? How does one love their body the way it is and yet try to change it at the same time?
I can’t put pressure on myself to lose weight, or I’ll go too far. You’d never know it to see me now, but I used to have two eating disorders. I’m an obsessive person by nature. Calorie counting becomes the focus, vomiting becomes regular. I don’t ever want to go back to that. But why is it that sometimes I can love myself the way I am and other times I can’t? How do you lose weight without dieting? How can I enjoy life and enjoy the foods that I like while still making sure I don’t go up a dress size? And why am I not good at this balance? Being size 18 is not bad, but I’d like to be a 16 or a 14, and I don’t want to go up to a 20 as I get older.
How can I get happy with my weight again, either by losing weight or by loving myself as I am?
In Italics
I have been mistreated by myself in italics.
I was mistreated in italics.
I was in italics when I was mistreated.
I have threatened myself
And been threatened by people who loved me
with knives for hands.
I cut everything.
Life is a hallway.
God this hallway is a mess,
my clothes strewn everywhere.
My Government
Peripheral issues,
like where to raise fireflies,
consume my government.
My government,
not yours.
I don’t share,
And my whole bureaucracy is off their meds, anyways.
Stop staring at my nudity.
You aren’t supposed to be here.
Burning Suburbia
Shades of slate and gun metal pursue me
in a way the other women wrapped in their profiles and friends
would understand more than they want to believe.
Our spirits dream while we say,
How much? That’s too much.
I have to have her there by 3.
We need to get away. It is never just us.
In the suburbs I drive over hillock after hillock
again and again,
for bread and milk,
my fingers searching beneath my skirt for something so dirty it is clean,
so corrupt as to be pure.
Church
Church of memoir
of discovery
of chants.
Cloistered in my name are ten lives
I did not live
in favor of a sublime 11th.
What is better than best?
What can joy can be discarded for ecstasy?
The taste of salt lines my mouth
when I look back.
translated to Xhosa, Afrikaans, and back
Church of Love
I find joy
while I lay cloistered in my ten lives.
Auroras swirl beyond my reach.
They will not live.
There is a reason I am so inordinately fond of 11.
What is better than a lot?
Why have I ignored peace?
It tasted of salt in my mouth.
Power lines guiding me back home.
Church of Love
Separate the gaiety from the joy.
Lonely in my ten lives,
they live,
it is as though they live without me.
How do I dispose of gaiety?
Of me?
Midwest
Fuzzy snowmen smell like turpentine.
Why all this wistful wind,
this heavy quiet,
these creative snowmen dancing in slow motion
to no music?
Not inaudible music,
or even illegible sound,
but nothing at all-
Machines with no factory.
This snow covers a ghost city.
The children scattered and died.
Yes, I am freezing.
Would you like to dance?
Birth and NICU
Angelica spent a week in the NICU when she was born because her oxygen levels would sometimes drop. She would always recover on her own, but they kept her at CHKD for a week anyways, and didn’t help her. We had to fight to get her out of there. Now here she is 3 years later healthy and happy. These are a few pictures from her birth but mostly pictures in the NICU and right after she got out of the NICU.
Fooling Around at Work, Ring, Happiness
Angelica’s Ultrasound Pictures
I wish I had been blogging regularly when I was pregnant with Angelica to have a record of all this in real time, but I just didn’t feel well enough to really keep up with anything. But I want to preserve these memories, so here are her first ultrasound pictures and the pictures from when we found out she was a girl.
I just want to mention that although these early ultrasounds name Commonwealth Women’s Health, they were actually terrible and I ended up delivering with Dr. Lackore, who was wonderful. I would definitely recommend him.
It makes me sad that I’ll never again get to go for a gender reveal ultrasound, but it is for the best and I’ve made my peace with it. I think.
Miniature Moon 