Barbados reveals

Part I.

I lay in the water face up, floating on my back, letting the viscous, salt water of the Caribbean Sea buoy me.  I could hear the sounds of my children and others around me as I drifted between the present and some other time.  The sea had never been this delicious, this wonderful.  I let myself be on my own.  Closed my eyes even though I feared the waves might crash over me and go up my nose.  I resisted the urge to raise my head and closed my eyes.  The sun was hot on my face.  I could feel the heat in my lips and inhaled the sea's aura all around me.  I started to time travel.  My ancestors who passed through Barbados on their way to the Carolinas stood closer to shore.  I sensed the bleed of their garments swirling around me.  In my mind's eye I saw their head wraps and skirts, watched them wipe their hands on their clothes, peeped them sneaking bits of mango into the mouths of their own children.  I recalled a time when visiting Jamaica as a young girl sucking the juice from a sugar cane stalk and wishing we could take this sweetness with us forever.  I remembered that the cane was the cotton of the Caribbean.  I remembered the gnarled hands of my great-grandfather, Jesse Ben, and his clean, well-shaped fingernails.  He was old when I was a girl and lived long into my adulthood.

I closed my eyes as waves rocked me and saw stars when I opened them to the turquoise and azure hues of the sky and sea.  I thought, as I often do when I find myself alone in nature, how did the people of long ago experience this?  I thought of Africans coming ashore in what looks like paradise, only to become slaves to someone else's heaven.  I thought of poor black people washing themselves in the sea, rubbing the fine sand on their faces and knees and elbows and feet as I'd seen many locals do when we lived here.  I recalled the old man who passed me going down the aisle on the airplane to find his way to the bathroom who looked like an older version of my father and wondered if my family tree, were I able to trace it, would find some of our people in Barbados.  I concluded that it was possible.  Maybe that was why we'd relocated there to begin with.  That I might find my way to myself somehow.

The sun was high and bright and the water's undulation hypnotic and the number of rum punches consumed had me outside of my control and into a space more nebulous and open.  Breathing in the air, feeling the water lap against my ears, I opened my eyes to consider how this place suddenly felt like home after all of the promises broken and kept, after the punishing loneliness, after I'd called her my heart of darkness.  But my heart of darkness still pumps life blood through me, shows me connection, and gives me direction.  She has been patient with me and has allowed me to love and be loved, no matter my fear of it.

Part II.

I was as afraid of Barbados as I was of myself.  She was dark and hot and humid and fecund and feral, shiny, damp, throbbing, and deep.  She wore her colonialism like a necklace or a yoke depending on what circle you traveled and she was beautiful.  She was in your face heavenly at times, then seedy and broken.  I'd come to Barbados like a white American tourist.  I don't say that with pride.  But I'd prepared, as did my Euro-centered, patriarchy-card carrying, rigidly gendered French husband, for a life in paradise.  A two year break from the grind.  We'd dreamt of sun and sea and sand and tropical drinks and "maybe even someone to help you care for the children; it's really cheap there, you know?"  I was still pregnant when we began the conversation about the move that would take us from New York City, my home, what I'd thought was my true north, to the Caribbean.

I'd only marginally considered how I'd relate or connect to the people of Barbados and was reassured that I'd meet the "wives of other employees" and would be part of an expatriate community which I presumed correctly would be mostly white.  In Barbados I was black but a different black.  I'd no Caribbean roots (that I knew of) and moved through space like a New Yorker.  I was efficient, abrupt, focused.  I acted with precision and purpose.  I was frustrated by the slower gaits, imprecise schedules, and indirect responses.  Expats marveled at the locals' disinterest in their companies' priorities, called them incapable, demonized their behavior and infantilized them in their minds.  My husband regaled me and anyone who would listen about the unsophisticated ways in which they worked, how uncouth, how unprofessional, how inelegant, and I was struck by the overtones. 

I'd spent my life, as instructed, proving these beliefs untrue.  I knew that whites' impressions of me could determine my opportunities.  That being likeable, malleable, complacent, unchallenging would allow me access to spaces forbidden to other black people.  Before I could be called lazy, I worked harder and more efficiently than anyone else.  Before I could be called messy or sloppy, I was well turned out and presented.  Before I could be called unintelligent, uneducated, unprepared for the tasks at hand, I'd worked and considered every angle.  There were rewards for this good behavior and the rewards quieted my restlessness for a time.  I believed they were what I wanted, gifts, treats.  I'd been a dear pet, a cultivated, curated, well-edited example of how to do it right, only revealed to be the sham that it was when the developing nation of Barbados showed me myself.

I know how I looked and I know what I sounded like and it fills me with shame.  In trying to right myself when postpartum depression and anxiety turned me upside down, I lashed out.  Self-loathing and internalized racism made me angry that Barbados hadn't easily opened herself to me.  Wasn't I her kin?  I had no friends.  Locals looked at me suspiciously, tried to suss me out, make heads or tails of this black American girl and her French husband and multicultural babies.  I was indignant for my husband, wished the cooks in his kitchen could make his life easier for him so that he could, in turn, make my life easier.  I willed them to be better, to act better, to give a damn about the shitty hotel company that couldn't have given a damn about them, to show up for their low wage in the hot kitchen to work tirelessly and thanklessly for spoiled tourists so my husband could be praised and exalted.  I hated what I believed they were doing to my family. The cultural divide between my husband and I broadened and I saw for the first time the weight of his self-importance and privilege and my deference to it.

I said silent prayers to Barbados to get her shit together. (Wasn't I trying to muffle my cries each night as I found my thoughts turn more and more psychotic?  Why couldn't she?  Why did she always have to show her contempt?  Her wounds?  Her pain?)  I asked her not to be as she was.  (I'd been stuffing myself down my throat my entire life!  My parents had hung up on my while I wailed in fear at the monkeys coming to the screen-less windows and I tried to act casual about it.)  I asked her to make it easier for the tourists visiting our landscape.  (Let them feel special and important.  Let them focus on your blue waters and have their hair braided and tell you that now they looked just like you.  Let them tell you how much they love you and your food and your dress and your style and then return to the air-conditioned luxury hotels and villas whilst you tell them they are pretty and return to your modest dwelling.)  I asked her to keep her skeletons in her closet.  (It can't be colonialism, racism, class structure, and history preventing your rise and your success.  Barbados is not ready for prime time, can't get it right.) 

In a class about the Barbadian character, my husband and other white expats were taught to expect a passive-aggressive position from the Bajans/Barbadians.  It was explained that because, unlike slave masters and traders on other islands of the Caribbean and in the United States, the slavers of Barbados had allowed families to stay together, had not separated them through sale, and had therefore made its black population more complacent, docile.  The terrain, unlike other islands, did not provide much place to escape.  There were no mountain ranges or protected landmasses in which to hide.  That this modified history was meant to explain to expat workers the resistance they might meet when dealing with locals making pennies to their dollars infuriated me.  That they believed it made it worse.  When my parents came to visit the island, my father said that Barbados "wasn't ready for prime time" and I knew that she still had more to prove.  We both did.

In New York City, I could disappear into the melting pot.  I could ride the subway, walk down the sidewalks, go to work, restaurants, parks with people from all walks of life.  Sure, there were pockets of complete WASPy whiteness and areas where black and brown communities set up "Little" versions of their homeland, but for the most part I was amongst the world's population every day.  The blackness of Barbados hit me like the wall of humidity that sweated my hair, all coiffed and presented for my reunion with my husband, when I walked down the stairs at the back of the plane the evening of our arrival to the island.  It curled my hair, glossed my cheekbones, and parted my lips.  She gave my swinging hips and the jiggle my ass made when I walked permission.  She showed me all the black ladies and men doing all the things.  She gave me eye contact and I was at first afraid to meet her gaze.

I got lost in Barbados.  Walking through the mansion's ruins deep in the forest of mahogany trees at Farley Hill overlooking the island's Atlantic Coast, I discovered her lush, soft heart, and mine for her.  I fell in love with this place and then the east coast.  My first foray into the island, going deeper to her core, no longer flitting on her edges where tourists and expats teased her and hedonistically played with her, I discovered another type of paradise.  It was morose and melancholy.  There was a Victorian sadness to this place.  Ghosts, secrets, and whispers.  It was here that I made my first friends on a class trip with my oldest girl. They resuscitated me.  They shared their secrets and let me tell mine.  This included my shame and my pride and my confusion.  I was able to admit that the paradise promised had not been what I'd expected.  That the sun was too bright and too hot for this exhausted mother, that our house was uncomfortable, that I'd been so lonely, that my husband didn't and couldn't meet my needs, that being a black, African-American expatriate in a country of black Caribbean people was more challenging than I'd expected. 

I didn't recognize the New Yorker who'd just begun making a career for herself, who'd finally found a real place to call home, who'd confronted assaults and deep old wounds only to see the post traumatic stress pull any sense of safety out from under her.  I couldn't believe how bad I was at living abroad.  I'd dreamed since I was a girl of being a "woman of the world" and then couldn't hack it.  I thought, I can't even hang on this little island with black people and I thought I was going to be a world traveler?  I'd been fed and made complacent on the spoils of the first world.  I wanted my rules, my food, temperature control, my media, fast internet, VOGUE magazine, sidewalks and clean streets.  I wanted businesses and companies that thought I was always right.  I wanted antiseptic correctness.  I feared real connection and contact and Barbados wanted to touch me.  Touch me with her warm fingers, take me into her beating heart, get mango juice and soursop, sugarcane, coconut, lime, breadfruit and flying fish fry in my hands and my hair.  I thought I could move there, live there, raise my children there and remain untouched, unchanged but she revealed herself to me and me to myself.



Part III.

Though I was angry with Barbados and my time spent there, I kept coming back. I kept up with dear friends and the weekly news.  I followed different organizations on the island and got excited about the island's successes.  I met people living in the United States from Barbados with pride and told them of my time spent there.  I tattooed a flying fish, the nation's symbol, on my right forearm underneath the Eye of Horus.  I still regaled people with my tales of monkeys and cultural confusion, long days spent at the immigration office, and word for word play by play of conversations I'd had with customer service at varying businesses, but I kept going back.  When I told white people I'd met about my years in Barbados they'd say, "See!  I knew you were from the islands!"  To which I'd always reply, "I'm actually an American born black person.  My parents and their parents are from here too.  We've no Caribbean roots that I know of."  They'd always meet my response with suspicious eyes.  They understood why they visit the Caribbean, for the sun and the sea, but couldn't imagine that I'd somehow have been there for the same reasons, suspected that I was keeping my roots a secret.  There is no secret.

My father and mother both went in search of their roots using ancestry.com and found what they'd pretty much suspected.  Many US narratives begin in West Africa, and theirs was no exception.  There are various European attributes that can more than likely be traced to the rape of my slave ancestors.  That's no secret.  They've also worked diligently with their siblings on their family trees to see how far back they can trace our family.  We are at the mercy of the slave masters' records.  What I know is that Barbados and the Carolinas have a very deep connection for both white slavers/forefathers and the slaves they transported with them for trade.  My people are from the Carolinas and the surrounding areas. 

As the daughter of black Southerners, I have made the connection to my slave ancestors, seen the soil where they toiled, been inside the modest homes where they lived.  I have been inside the churches and listened at my grandparents' and my great-grandparents' knees of stories that brought dimension and depth and value to the lives of the people who came before me.  I loved their character, their strength, and their dignity.  I despised that they were made to bend to the whims of white people, that their lives were not fully realized because of what racism and poverty inflicted upon them, and that the crosses they were made to bear were never acknowledged by the good, white people who'd unloaded them onto their backs.  These warm brown, beautiful people never believed how glorious they were.  That their lush, dark, soft hearts, sweated brows, and sinewed arms, strong hands, and wooly hair deserved to be loved.

It is with that love that I return to Barbados.  To tell her that I love her, and myself, in her imperfection.  That is she a baby, a young one, and that I am sorry for having been unforgiving.  I have been that way for myself.  Because I didn't learn that my blackness, my heat, my desire, my need, my gifts, my treasures, my heart, my humanity was enough.  That I could allow myself a moment to float aimlessly or rest.  That I didn't have to prove that I was other than I was.  Than I am.  When I next visit Barbados, I am going to spend Foreday Morning with my friends native and adopted.  I am going to follow the steps of the man who looks like my father and let myself be painted in mud and colors.  I am going to wash myself off in the sea and trace the color stained sweat down my face.  I am going to rise and fall with other black people into the night and let Barbados finally, actually fill up the cracks in my story.  I may jump at the Grand Kadooment or find other Cropover events in which to participate and I will come to the sea and float on my back, careful not to let the water go up my nose.  I will let the water come to my ears and listen for my heartbeat.  I will catch the heartbeat of those who came before me and I will let the sun brown my body to a deep mahogany.  

Barbados nearly broke me.  She did crack me open.  And is now filling those cracks with moon dust.  What I'd wanted was a picture, a two dimensional postcard of my life.  Instead I found that I must put my hands in, dig in deep, pull from myself the lies and deceits embedded in me to make me easier, less than I am.  I have learned to love being this black woman.  I have loved having a deep, wounded, melancholy heart because she has shown me how to be compassionate.  I know the chemtrails of slavery weave themselves across my soul's starry sky and that I have carried that dark secret as it were my own.   It isn't only mine to bear.  What is my own is the light.  What is mine is my heartbeat in my ears as I float in the water.  What is mine is the undulating rhythm of the waves.  What is mine are the things revealed to me living in Barbados.



(c) Copyright 2017.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.

Moving in Quick sand

I've voted for candidates who've not won before.  I have accepted defeat with a few tears and resolve.  I have felt ready to face it all again four years later because I have believed that even if everyone did not think as I did (and I have never been myopic enough to think they did so) that we, Americans, THAT WE, had agreed upon everyone's right to at least live in their own space in their own peace even if we (or I) longed for us to reach a greater love and understanding of one another.  I'd taken comfort that though I suspected/knew that behind closed doors there was a good deal of racist and sexist banter going on in the White House and cabinet of presidents in which I held little faith, I expected they'd at least try to hide their shameful behavior and policies with rhetoric and not come right out and assault us with hate.  And I wasn't afraid of them.

I can't lie.  I have always anticipated some level of racism from my fellow Americans, white Americans, and am always pleasantly surprised when someone shows me otherwise.  I listen to the stories they choose to tell, choose to share with me and the rest of the world and cull tiny messages, read the pinpoints on their maps to know if deep down or perhaps on the surface, they don't or can't fully respect me and my experience.  Somehow the shame was mine, that I suspected that I should do more, be more or less, convince them by contorting myself, my beliefs, my strong voice, my thick legs, my alarming sexuality, my very blackness, that I should be smaller in the world so that they might be able to live in a world that had me in it.  Even I allowed that the world, that America, did not belong to me and was thankful for every small mercy that showed me differently.

For every friend who told me of their racist auntie, of their schools where no people of color attended, of their churches, towns, teams, and other organizations in which they participated without ever seeing a black person, I winced and then offered some level of comfort to them.  Well, you are here now.  You are part of this diverse community.  That counts.  And sure.  It does.  It does.

When I was a girl, I saw the world through the low-res footage of the Polaroid camera and loved looking at the world in the black and white of my parents' and grandparents' "olden days."  Their pictures fascinated me because everyone looked so young and beautiful but the tales they told of the time, the parts of the tales that had to do with white people, were violent and bleak and terrifying.  The Civil Rights Era was not just part of history, tales made flat and two-dimensional by the textbook, but the stories told by my family, the young, beautiful family of a time that the United States of America was truly black and white and all shadows.  I lived among white people in a nearly completely white community and lived my life every day with a pinch of fear.  I knew that even in the face of good, kind, supportive white people, I'd better be sure that someone of color, someone who "knew" would have my back up front.

I was ashamed of this, ashamed that I distrusted, that I was not letting love in my heart, that I was not turning the other cheek.  I'd always felt that the burden was on me to prove myself open, easy-going, and cool.  I tried to let microaggressions and judgments roll off me, not let the blood rush to my cheeks.  Defused offenses with laughter, assault with excuses, ignorance with forgiveness -- "they know not what they do."

But I still held my breath.  I held my breath because I knew that it was just a matter of time before someone revealed that they weren't as down for my cause as they'd hoped.  Held my breath because I knew I might meet their mother/father/grandmother/auntie/cousin/friend/neighbor who said shit like, "that neighborhood is full of n****s not good black people like you," and I wouldn't know how to respond.  Because I was twelve.  Held my breath because someone would tell me that they didn't understand why all the other black kids were in different classes and not in the advanced classes with me.  Held my breath because someone wanted me to know that they just didn't find black girls attractive or black people attentive or able to swim or couldn't get lice or whatever it was they'd heard.  Held my breath when, though in the top ten percent of my class, lesser students dared tell me that I'd surely get into the college of my choice because of affirmative action and wanted me to agree to as much.  Held my breath because the cute boy told me that he really liked me but that his grandmother would roll over if he came home with a black girl and I felt badly for HIM.  Held my breath because sometimes it was all too much and the short breaths were all I could take in without letting my emotions seep out.

First there are tears and then there is rage!  And I learned that it was the rage, the rage that scared everyone off.  Even your allies couldn't stand for your rage.  Your family, your friends, the people who were trying to love you in their own way, to study you, understand you, who longed for whatever it was that being a black girl meant to them, turned from your rage.  It revealed too much.  Too much of the pain behind your forgiveness, behind your memories, behind your hope.  So you channeled it.  Made the world.  Held it up.  Shone the lights.  Held your breath.  Sucked it in with your head high, eyes focused, became a pillar, face tight with smiles but the heart pumping blood, veins and vessels pounding, eyes blinking, lashes fluttering, cool breaths sucked in and out through your lips.

Simmering, a slow boil and each assault or insult, each death called us from against the wall and whispered, "you'd better let it out or it'll blow."  Heat flushed our ears and our cheeks and we were at first embarrassed, humiliated, scared, and then the rage.  The rage came and poured like lava melting the glossy papered image of what we were expected to be into something harder to identify.  Our beautiful black friends staring past us, the invitation standing to join but no more asking or pleading.  Get on or get off.  And we wanted everyone on board.  We all did. WE did--the blacks, non-whites, immigrant, Muslim, LGBTQ, disabled, the intersected of all these groups--we want you on board.  Without you, your racist/sexist/bigoted/homophobic/cruel/apathetic mother/father/auntie/uncle/friend/cousin/neighbor will never hear another side to their fear-mongering, hateful rhetoric or their privileged denials and apathy.  They have already chosen not to believe me, not to believe us.  While I "may not be like the others,"  I still can't shake my otherness.  You must go in for me.

Listening at the foot of my grandmother in her front sitting room to the tales of a defiant great-granddad and seeing him in his black and white, youthful glory, seeing the uncles in their overalls who stood across the street from the little soda shop/cafeteria that was segregated while their nephews and sons attempted a sit in in white, short-sleeved button downs, and slacks.  Pouring over photos of our parents in large Afros and sideburns, wide collars, and short skirts.  Seeing our photos become clean and Kodakchromed and colored as our friendship barrettes and hoop earrings, lightening bolted enamel pins and designer jeans came into fashion.  Seeing the events of our nation unfold in real time in moving pictures in social media.  We are here.  You must go for us.

When I was a girl I was afraid of stray dogs because I didn't believe they'd listen to my command to stop.  I was afraid of quicksand because it looked like regular ground until you were deep in it and then it just might be too late.  I was afraid of someone disrespecting or challenging my family because I believed they'd already been through enough and didn't want to see them wounded or have them face me having been.  And I was terrified of someone calling me "nigger," "blackie," "brown sugar" in mixed company not only because it would burn my heart and rise up in my cheeks and my ears and force my tears, but because I was afraid to know just who would and would not stand for me.  

Those Kodak pictures from that time show me in my youth already navigating the world's mines and expecting that I might blow up first.  That little girl had hope but low expectations for others for whom supporting and loving her might be a burden, might even put them in harm's way.  That little girl learned to accept defeats that were altogether unfair, more than likely biased, and influenced by a society that valued her less than all the white children that surrounded her.  It is with shock but not complete surprise that a raging, narcissistic, racist, sexist, bigoted, misogynistic blowhard has been elected president.  It is the culmination of all my fears.  It is the ground made quick sand.  It is a stray dog jumping up and putting its paws on my shoulders looking like he might bite my face.  It is embarrassing the legacy of my hard-working, well-educated, dedicated, God-fearing, loving family and all the sacrifices they made to get me to my basic rights.  It is being called "nigger" or watching my friends cursed and assaulted because they are gay or Muslim or Hindi or Sikh (because please don't know the difference) or in a mixed relationship or disabled or a woman, strong or meek, or poor or uneducated or not quite what America had in mind when they narrowed their definition of "American."

When Al Gore and John Kerry conceded I felt deflated.  I'd had faith in their abilities to lead, to govern, to be fair and inclusive.  I felt that even if they could not ever meet or even understand the needs of my community and the communities of those I love, but I thought they might try.  I thought they wanted to understand, that they wanted to unify.  I was afraid of the machine that Ronald Reagan and the Bushes drove over communities I loved.  But what I feel now is terror.  Absolute fear.  I stare at my old class pictures, run my fingers over the old faces of friends, classmates, people who have said how much they love me, care for me, enjoyed our friendships who have voted against my very right to live as they'd like to live.  We are sinking.  That quicksand catches you and takes down slowly.  What happens is that we suffocate and drown and don't even know we've gone down.  And we all go down.


(c) Copyright 2016.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.

This moment: RIP, Prince

I stand outside myself when I remember the moment.  I see myself, just out of the shower, hair wet, towel draped loosely around me, when my phone pings the "illuminate" ringtone which tells me my sister needs me or wants to make me laugh.  I don't rush to it, know it will be there until I check it, and put on some underwear first.  The rest of my clothes are on the bed but I don't grab them just yet, instead I pick up the phone to read the message.

Prince is dead. Devastated. Mess.

And I am naked except for the underwear I just put on and need more clothes because I feel so naked but also need to call her.  I want to be dressed.  Because I will remember this moment and want to be dressed.  I don't want to be crying in my room, which I am now doing near hysterically, as I fumble for the TV remote and the phone.  I reach my sister and the news channel at the same time and she is saying yes but I don't see it on TV so maybe it is not true.  Because why would it be true.  Because it can't be.  And I keep putting on my clothes but also a blanket over my still wet head to wait for the news on TV.

It's there.  A still of Prince from Purple Rain and that 1958-2016 at the end.  The marker of time.  I think, "I'll die in your arms under the cherry moon."  I think, "Until the end of time, I'll be there for you.  You own my heart and mind, I truly adore you."  I think, "Baby, baby, baby...what's it gonna be tonight...."  The first songs that coming from my subconscious to my head.  He's gone.

The moments, hours, days, and now weeks that follow I move in a slow jam of molasses.  I am going through life's motions but the pull at my throat and the corner of my eyes and my solar plexus and my chest don't let me forget that I feel profound loss for someone I don't know but who helped me discover myself.  The journey he led me on at various stages of my life by sharing his cannot be overstated.  I've heard it said that when one is, say, tripping on psychedelic mushrooms or acid, a good guide, someone who has already experienced the effects and visuals, can help navigate the emotional roller coaster, the drama of the alternate universes, and the mind-blowing imagery of that sojourn.  My life with Prince's music has been such a trip.

Some nights I react to his passing in the lower chakras.   I actually drop to my knees with ache and longing.  I feel untethered and disconnected, empty and ungrounded.  Prince gave me license to be in possession of myself and to connect to the energies, physical and psychic around me.  I felt the hair stand up on my arm, my heart beat faster, my head spin, my legs go weak in the landscape he created.  I dared not be ashamed of my otherness, my sexuality, the magnetic pull and attraction between souls.  

"They feel the heat, the heat between me and you."  

There are no words for what the 15 year old me felt when she first heard those lyrics.  I felt like I'd been told a secret, that something lurking inside would be impossible to hide when I discovered my soul's mate.  I don't think I'd ever stood face to face with a boy at that time, let alone felt his heat, but I knew something wicked and delicious and terrifying would happen when I did. Songs of love and longing had not been so visceral for me until that moment.  So much of Prince's music took me through the full range of emotions, love, sex, heartbreak, pleasure and pain.  The sacred and the profane.  The spiritual longing, the seeking, and the command he took on stage, in the studio, on the screen made him both pilgrim and guide.  

I loved that Prince did not apologize for his blood, sugar, sex, magic (to quote the Red Hot Chili Peppers).  He was all those wicked things and a vulnerable man cub. He was music's Mowgli walking through the jungle of the human psyche in all its dank, dark, delicious earthiness.  He was sexy and naked and sweating and sweet and looked at us all with those wet eyes and everyone fell.  He was so real as to be surreal.  So truly enigmatic that no matter how often he was asked to define himself, he believed in not doing so, he was.  That he is gone in a blink takes away a pocket of that magic.

I'm haunted by his passing as much because I loved him and his music at a time when I was flowering into my own being as that I, and so many others, had no idea how he was suffering.  I am haunted by the man alone, by the tunnels I imagine him passing through to get from studio to studio, the corridors and chambers of his secret spaces.  I feel stunned by all the work amassed, the work never heard, the work, the work, the art, the music that he kept making even when his fans still connected to the tried and true, the music that we knew.  I imagine him alone, in the quiet, with his god and his muse, creating and hurting, and being distinctly human on a quest for the divine.  I consider my own pain, my own loneliness, my own torment and compare it though I know I shouldn't.  I think of an artist in physical pain and addiction and imagine the sorrow.  And then the lyrics flood me and everyone in my life really for infinity because we have to listen to his music until I say stop and I have not yet.

And in this moment in my life, waiting at a stop light, mindlessly folding laundry, sending a message, reading, or dreaming, the songs come back, pop into my head like mile markers.  You've come by here before, they say.  Remember when you ached, longed for that boy, fought your own demons, wanted, needed.  Do you remember when you were alone?  When it was another time?  Another place?  And it was quiet and you were naked and out of the shower and had no idea which way the day would go?

I feel guilty for taking so long to let go.  My mood is revealed by what's playing.  One is warned whether or not to ask the question, show me the Beanie Boo, or ask for another something by my dancing or my silence.  After the call, I slowly, silently finished getting dressed.  I'd turned off the TV at some point probably to hear my sister better as we talked.  The house was still.  

If I gave you diamonds and pearls
Would you be a happy boy or a girl
If I could I would give you the world
But all I can do is just offer you my love*

(Prince and the New Power Generation, Diamonds and Pearls)

It hadn't been one of my favorites but there it was.  And I sang it out loud to break the silence.  And as I'd felt so many times before listening to his music, I wanted someone to offer their love.  

RIP, Prince Rogers Nelson

(c)  Copyright 2016.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.

A Case of the 23's

Our main babysitter is 23 years old.  A gorgeous redhead with long legs and a nervous giggle, she's smart and kind and good and funny and so loved by the girls that they throw their arms around her whenever they see her anywhere.  Even at St. James Gate where we went for a beer and a bite and they saw her saddled up to the bar on her laptop on a corner stool trying to people watch and hide from the crowds.  I love her too.  She feels so very familiar to me.

Recently, she has been cancelling our babysitting gigs at the last minute possible with lots of apologies and promises to do better and each time, rather than giving her the business.  I gently explain to her how and why this is not acceptable, make other arrangements, and then check in on her a day or two later.  I have talked her through break-ups, move outs, job searches, resume building, heartache, hospital stays, sending texts in the night when a thought comes into my mind.  I want her to feel loved and cared for.  She's 23.  It's hard to know.

When I was 23, I found my poor soul at the end of one of the most important relationships of my life. While other bigger adults knew that this was par for the course, my imminent break up was consuming me, actually consuming me and I was achy and scrawny and scratchy and messy.  I'd sent my belongings out to Colorado to move with him, where we'd live "as friends and roommates" because the shit was over and I had somehow agreed to that.  I'd quit my job, the job procured with the help of one of my favorite people on earth, a college painting and drawing professor who really guided me in a way I'd not been in my life, and told everyone "So long, suckas!" And then backtracked.  "What the f*** was I doing?"  I had not thought this plan all the way through.  I was going to MOVE to Colorado with my once boyfriend/love of my life, now roommate/pal/friend/what and live there?  Maybe this really did require some tears and some sense and somebody help me.  I was a tortured mess.   Walked all over Boston from one end to the next in the heat of the summer, eating only grapes and Cheerios, taking the occasional psychedelic, and drinking wine.  I cried from sun up to sundown and in between worked and walked and cried into the telephone, making teary phone calls at 5 am to anyone who would pick up.  I missed appointments and sat in corner seats at the bar thinking I was invisible when I was really lovely and basically had no idea what on earth I was doing.

When I was in my thirties and living in New York, trying my hand at acting and doing stuff I always said I would, I fell hard for a boy who was 23.  Ah, the 23 year old boy.  He was stunning.  Brand new and full of ideas and dreams.  An old soul, so we had that, but young and 23.  Gorgeous in the way that only a new adult can be.  I couldn't bear to prevent him from the starts and stops and joys and pains of my twenties, couldn't even ask that he catch up to me, do what I wanted, be where I was, and it ended as I suppose it should have.  Even now, I wonder how this boy grew into a man because there was so much there already...at 23.

When my sitter calls or texts each time to say she's sorry but she had to throw up, missed her train, lost her keys, just cannot pull it together, I swear that this is the absolute last straw.  I need someone more reliable, someone who can commit, who cares about my schedule and my needs.  I DO need that still.  And sometimes I ask someone else to come or trade off my kids for someone else's another day.  But when someone comes down with a case of the 23's, they need compassion and they need guidance and they need love.  I give the business.  I do.  I say things like, "You don't want to represent yourself out there like that. You don't want to prove to be untrustworthy.  Your word is your bond, you have to give it sincerely."  I'm right.  But I also remember being and feeling so brand new and believing that everything was just as urgent and important and earth-shattering as the first baby steps of a toddler.  The world was opening up.  I wanted to and believed I could do anything...if I could just get out of my own way.

When the girls get there, to 23, I hope I can breathe that rarefied air with them, recall when someone gave me a break and a nudge, let me go into the world and said they'd catch me, they'd be there, they'd let me figure it out, and give them the space to fuck up so beautifully.  It is a fleeting moment, special and lovely, where you can get away with just about anything.   Worn like leggings with short shirts, t-shirts with no bra, high heels with everything.  It's for the young.  And they look so good doing it, even if they drive you crazy and leave you hanging.



(c) Copyright 2015.  Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.