Winter birthday wishes

January 2nd usually marked the return to normalcy or a soft landing like the movie stuntmen made onto that huge pillow at the end of the holiday circus.  Rather the celebration of the Christ child and  the baby new year than me.  While I didn't want to be forgotten completely, I was happy to get back to life as we knew it with a tiny secret tucked behind my ear, kissed there by the aliens who, in the dead of night, have always given me promises of a good future, not just resolutions but truths to which I was completely committed.  I still believe in the probability of great achievement even in the face of total chaos and seemingly impossible obstacles.  Though I have never been good at the holidays, what with all the celebrating and wide opened hearts on display, the arrival of the girls brought a chance for me to live them with different eyes, a more gracious heart, and a sense of wonder and hope.

Every year since I can remember, the arrival of the "winter holidays" has brought a little bit of tension, a little bit of the blues, and an eerie calm like the dead quiet of the first inches of a massive Nor'easter falling heavily on whichever sleeping town or block I was living.  It feels somewhere between a whisper and the ringing in the air after a scream.  I can hear my breathing.  Sometimes I can see my breath.  Always I am aware that I am alive even if I can't move from the cold or the fear, and am fully aware of my surroundings even if I want to run.  Always I feel awkwardly alone even when surrounded by crowds of family and friends.  Alone but not quite lonely.  Here, but not quite here.  I can't be lonely with the two people standing on my neck, whispering in my ear, chatterbugging to my face.  Maybe that's why they came to me.  To connect me to place, pry open my wintered heart.

2013 was hardly different from previous years--family ups and downs, community involvement, extracurriculars, doctors' visits, health checks and scares and reassurances, travel, work, parenting, craziness.  I don't think I have counted my "best or worst" years since I was a child when the best or the worst was defined by gifts I received or didn't, skills I acquired or didn't, loves found or lost.  Now, every year starts off full of promise, more than 1/2 full with the days firmly on one side, ahead of me.  Every year I know that I will peel back the onion to find some other truth about myself, my soul's journey, my desire, and my fulfillment.  I make no promises other than to try to remain open to whatever comes, to avoid (or try not to bring it all the way to insane clown posse meltdown) the panicked shut down when the world delivers what I expected but for which I had somehow been poorly prepared.  At the beginning of every year I have promised myself, "This is the year for me.  This is the year I will find the path, stay on it, actualize."  I say this every year.  I believe it every time.  I don't write the directions, don't set the map in stone and quickly wander from the path...or perhaps discover the one worn in the ground, not paved.

I followed the breadcrumbs back to a language I'd almost forgotten I spoke.  Many speak it more eloquently, some with grace and agility, others flexibility, but when I speak to them too, they understand.  In 2013 I returned to dance. When I was a girl who hated her voice and was sure no one cared what I might have to say, there was dance.  When I needed to free myself from the torment of the bad years and celebrate the joys of the good, there was dance.  When I had a secret to keep, something that I needed to protect, I could dance around it, seal it in.  And then I stopped, quit moving altogether, froze, and then allowed myself to believe that another form of exercise, maybe the machines at the gym, maybe an abs class, could suffice.  They couldn't.  Not yoga, even with all the breath and meditating and connection to the divine, warmed my soul.  It was dance that first connected me to my own life force.  Reclaiming it was so helpful to everything in my life. 

When I was a little girl, my mother asked for the same things for her birthday, Christmas, and Mother's Day.  Peace and quiet and for everyone to get along.  We thought that was the craziest request on earth.  "That's all she wanted?" I'd wonder.  What a waste of a rub of the lamp.  You can have anything three little cherubs and a workaholic husband can offer!  I get it now.  As I reanimate the creative back into my life, each day becomes mine to do with it what I will.  I can ease myself out of the tepid pool of suburban monotony and feel passion burning me up again.  I want that more than I want anything else.

I have, and have admitted, struggling with the daily expectations of raising children and running a household.  I want to do them both well.  Hell, I want to do everything well, but I believe that I bring more to everything in my life with the creative spirit and energy weaving throughout.  At the start of every year, I remind myself of this.  Somewhere along the way the priorities shift and I find myself making excuses, putting off making art, writing, dancing, and allow the minutiae of parenting and being married to be more important.  I'm going to do better this year.  At least I am going to try.

My husband was gone for Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Years and my birthday.  He has been for nearly every one of these holidays since we've been together.  I have stopped allowing myself to suffer this and surely cannot let his absence during these days define the entire year.  Or me.  Or my life.  I don't want to be defined by absence or by a "lack of."  But when he returns and asks what I want for all the holidays I missed, it's not a necklace, a scarf, socks, or new boots that I am after.  It is some of that quiet, some of that peace, some of the space where I can create or believe myself able again.  It is solitude and my own communion with the end of the year and the start of my new one.


My birthday starts up the music, begins the lightly playing song that guides me through the year.  It is wintry and quiet and moody and grey and cloudy followed by bursts of sun in a cerulean blue sky, cold as hell frozen over, that thaws into a promising spring.  I've bundled up into it and survived the shortest day of the year and the longest parade of holiday celebrations.  And on this day, I danced and wrote and drew a little sketch.  Running head first, out the window, to the stunt man's pillow down below.  To the new year.  Mine.



(c) Copyright 2014.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.

Dance

In the first phase of my life, elementary school to high school, if you asked anyone about me in my school or neighborhood how to describe me or my interests, after reporting that I was one of a handful of black (now African-American) kids, they would tell you that I loved to dance.  Danced all the time.  Ballet, tap, jazz, Russian character, the hustle, the bump, whatever 70s and 80s style dances were available to watch on Soul Train, I was about it.  I didn't just love it, I was good at it.  Enough that my dance teacher asked my parents to come in and speak with her one afternoon to tell them that she could set up some appointments for me in the city with a couple of dance schools/companies, should I (they) be interested.  They assured her (and me) that I (they) were not.  I'd convinced myself that there could be no life for me in dance.  That dancers could not make a living, that I was smart and should do something that smart people do like go to college and study and write papers and get a good job that paid good money which is what a contributor to society did.  I always felt that I gave in too eagerly and too quickly.  I'd given up something that I loved more than I'd loved anything because I was afraid.  Because I was doubtful that I could ever be that good at anything.

The dance school was small time, but we lived big in our dreams.  We watched endless ballets, studied choreography.  Michael Jackson's Beat It, which finally had its chance on MTV, just blew my mind open.  Seeing all those dancers, not just ballerinas, but dancers with all different body types, strong men and women, combining their training with improvised street styles moving in all kinds of way to different rhythms and using their bodies like instruments of sound and movement got me so wound up I often moved my body in my sleep.  I danced all night in my dreams.  I cannot say, really, with any certainty that I would have made a great professional dancer, but I did love it and before I found my voice, which happened in my late teens and early twenties, I felt that dance was one of the only ways for me to communicate in a way that was honest and real and true.

Then came college and a strict education in visual arts--drawing, painting, studio techniques, sculpture, ceramics, anatomy, printmaking--and a life of movement seemed worlds away.  I have not been good at allowing myself the space to work in all media at once.  Some call if focused, others obsessive, but I have a hard time switching from one area to the next, feeling that I am not committing enough to just one discipline.  It was the same trying to learn Spanish after learning passable French.  I just could not separate the two languages and ultimately had to give up one.  I gave up French to learn Spanish and then when I met my French hubby, gave up Spanish to relearn French.

Once a dancer, always a dancer.  I love to move.  Watching dancers, I sit up high in my seat moving along with them, marking their movements and feeling the music inside of me as though I were actually moving. I love the freedom that movement gives my spirit and have found that in the greatest moments of depression, I hold myself rigidly so as not to let that freedom enter my heart.  It's that overwhelming.  I am that sure of it's power to release my hold and control on myself.  As I have been finding my way back to myself, dancing has somehow found its way to me too.  First, taking the girls to class has reminded me of my time as a student.  Then, I took a Cardio Jams class which was a parent/child class that had bits of dance, yoga, exercise, and stretching that left me over the moon and talking non-stop.  My husband was worn down by the constant chatter that had started as a flutter in my tummy and rose to my heart and then to the purest joy.  I was dancing again!

Today, I took another class with Lily at a fundraiser for the school district.  Because I am a crazy, paranoid freak, I was sure that we needed to arrive early to secure our place.  We were there in time to see the adult class ending.  I had my face pressed against the window which was wet with sweat drops dripping down from the windows as the dancers, moms and other women of my community, got their dance on.  They were great, the choreography exciting, and the energy electric.  I promised myself I would be in that class as soon as I could. 

I was right about the Cardio Jams.  The place was packed.  Lily and I had a fantastic time together and when I danced in the middle of a circle, letting the music just course through me, Lily looked at me as though she'd never seen me before.  She said, "Mommy, I didn't know you could do that!"  And I told her,"Baby, I think Mommy had forgotten."  I want to remember.  I want to return to dance for my exercise, for my freedom, for my joy.  Being in the class with the other parents and our children, I let go of my hang ups about my body.  There were women who were taller, more slender, more fit, beautiful, clean, and glamorous.  But I didn't care.  I can dance.  I dance. I love to dance.  And I want it to be part of my life again.  When I was young and did not speak, could not express myself, there it was and now, even though I can express myself, maybe even talk too much, the movement might sometimes be all I want to say.



(c) Copyright 2013.  Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.