Choose Life

 TRIGGER WARNING:  Discussion of suicide, death, and loss.

Two weekends ago, I sat between two very dear friends, behind the parents of a friend who could be better described as an acquaintance, a well-loved acquaintance but a woman to whom I'd never gotten very close, at a memorial service.  I was sad, I was angry, and I was very hurt and didn't know how to communicate these emotions.  I was sending X-ray beams to the back of her mother's head, pleading with her to see her, understand her, care about her.  And was then angry with myself for feeling that way.  For blaming her.  For wishing she'd cared more, tried harder, had given her daughter a break, just let her be.  That wasn't fair.  I know that.  

I'd run into this woman just a month before at Trader Joe's.  I was walking out as she was coming in and just starting her shopping and the exchange was brief, head nods and smiles, a wink.  I was in a rush and she seemed lost in thought or her list.  I'm really not sure.  I didn't think much of that exchange until a few weeks later when I learned that she'd taken her life.  She was dead.  I kept seeing her face looking down at that list.  I replayed every moment we'd been together, her asking me about something or other, talking about the wine at a party.  She was dead.  And then she was standing over me doing my make up as she'd just started selling Mary Kay cosmetics and needed someone to practice her technique and her sales pitch.  I'd said, "I didn't think you wore make up."  To which she replied, "I'm trying something new.  My mother always said I'd do better to wear some make up."  And I resented her mother for putting the idea into her head that she was not enough and reassured her she was.  At least that's what I think I did.  Maybe she thought I should just shut up because she was trying something new.  

She'd been a lawyer and was incredibly intelligent, more cerebral and intellectual than I (or so it seemed).  I'd met her through other friends and saw her most often in the company of the others, except for the afternoon that she did my make up and we talked about trying new things and make up and raising children, daughters in particular, (She has a daughter and a son.) and how beautiful my own mother is and how incredible my mother's skin is and that maybe she'd try Mary Kay.  This was nervous chatter.  Having her there doing my make up, so up close, trying to convince me to buy the lipstick, the shadow, and the face creams when I rarely wore make up and if I did I sought products that would look good on my brown skin, which to my mind Mark Kay was not such a product, made me uncomfortable.  I told her as much in a series of emails after our meeting.  I did not want to let her down, didn't want her to waste her product on someone who was not going to buy anything.  I wanted her to win.  I felt her need for approval, for acceptance.  And I was upset with her mother for saying she'd do better to wear make up because she clearly did not feel comfortable in it.

And she now was dead.  I hurt her hurt and retraced the steps I'd imagined she'd taken before that last, sudden, violent moment.  And as sublime as the moment seems in poetry, in story, in song, the truth of it, the starkness, the finality, and the violence broke me.  I thought I should have spoken to her at Trader Joe's.  Should have looked into her eyes and said something to her, whatever it might be, that might make her choose life one more day.  I thought of the acting exercise, "the private moment' where the actor lives a moment where he'd not expect anyone to see him, lets down his guard, experiences the moment unapologetically, unself-consciously, and I hurt all over again imagining those last moments.

Her family and friends were in tears, completely shattered and stunned.  There were photographs of her at various stages of her life and I racked my brain trying to recall if we'd ever taken photos at the dinners and parties we'd attended together.  I closed my eyes searching for her ghost in photos of us that were never taken.  I felt her loss in the world, in my world, but didn't have the proof.  Couldn't find a photo in my mind's files.  Looking across the aisle at her children, I thought of my own and those years ago in Barbados when the daily routine seemed impossible.  I remember the despair of postpartum depression and the loneliness of my marriage and the daunting prospect of attempting to live each day.  And I felt that cold breath, that sigh between here and somewhere else and the pull in my chest and the ache in my core as I struggled to choose life.  I don't feel at all close to that edge now but that feeling has never left me.

In a bedroom community outside of New York City, the sound of the passing trains is a common occurrence and every time I hear it now, it gives me pause.  I think of the photo of her as a young girl in a brimmed hat, looking so like a character from a novel, a kind-hearted innocent, a girl from another time and place.  Her eyes in that photo were so gentle and soft and sweet.  She, full of promise.  There is yellow light around her, framing her in a memory of a perfect moment in a perfect day.  I didn't know her then.  I also didn't know the young girl in the short hair that flipped at the sides, snuggling a bunny to her chin.  But I recognized the woman that she became in her gesture.  She was warm.  She was kind.  She was sweet and loving and good and she seemed, in that moment of love, so truthful, so vulnerable, and so present.  

And now she is dead.  I say dead because gone doesn't do the loss the justice it commands.  Gone could mean that when ready she could return and she won't.  I sat behind her mother who did not, could not speak at the service and searched her father's face as he spoke of her, his voice cracking and faltering as he tried to hold her in this world with a sweet memory,  for some answer that would explain why this happened.  I looked at her ex-husband and her children and all of her friends and colleagues.  I did not look in the faces of my dear friends who sat next to me but I did squeeze their hands.  

It is so lonely being a human being sometimes.  Even when you are sitting next to someone and holding their hands, when you are in a crowd, when you are being feted and loved and surrounded, when you are on a beautiful Caribbean island living the fantasy of so many, there can be illness, depression, pain, and despair that those around you cannot know unless you share, tell them, trust them.  It is truly a risk to take.  I get it more than I care to admit.  But it's a gift this life.  I believe it and I continue to choose it.  I hate considering making a decision that ends with this choice.  I hate that there is no one to blame no matter that I was clearly searching for someone.  That no one knew how deeply despaired she was, how she'd tired of it all, how what haunted her began to share this earthly plane with her and that her dreams were no longer a safe place to escape.  I hate it so much that I replay every breathing moment I know of her life and imagine the moment she took her last.  I want to be there for her, be her witness, acknowledge her just as she was and in my magical thinking, will her back to this plane.  But she is more than gone and she won't be back.

If you have suicidal thoughts, please seek help.  You can call 1-800-273-8255 twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

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

Back to the Suburban Grind: Offline

Back to the Suburban Grind: Offline: It wasn't when people in my feed started explaining what Trayvon Martin did wrong (yeah, Trayvon).  It wasn't when a former babysitt...

Offline

It wasn't when people in my feed started explaining what Trayvon Martin did wrong (yeah, Trayvon).  It wasn't when a former babysitter typed, "Hey, black people" I suppose to get my attention and the attention of my black people friends as she explained our experience to us.  It wasn't when one after another, black men, women, and children were shot and killed by police or sketchy white neighbors or strangers and were shown no justice, but I saw only posts about home renos and favorite cupcakes.  It wasn't Colin Kaepernick and all he inspired on one knee getting character slandered and pummeled.  It wasn't the endless reaction and outrage to every post begging the larger community to recognize that Black Lives Matter did not take anything away from them but that All Lives Matter spit in the faces of folks they called "friends." It wasn't that.

It wasn't when Brock Turner got away with a rape that everyone knew he'd committed or my revisited trauma when listening to the comments made about "the kinds of girls and women who are sexually assaulted" and the acknowledgment that a black girl or woman in such a predicament may as well keep that shit to herself since no one even gives a fuck about the white girl behind the dumpster.  It wasn't one more post about the "gay agenda" and how proud some families feel about "kicking that no good kid out on his ass" because he was somehow born this way but-not-in-my-house-dammit.

It wasn't even watching the unfathomable rise of a straight up racist, misogynist, rotten to the core blowhard in the run up to a presidential election, or seeing friends with friends who support this horse's ass telling me there was nothing they could do about their friend's or family member's opinion and  go on about their lives.  The build up of racism, misogyny, rape culture, misogynoir, misguided, uneducated and under-educated thoughts and theories that were breaking my spirit.  As one childhood friend or acquaintance after another showed themselves to be completely ignorant and unable to use any amount of reason, compassion, or empathy to the plight of peoples other than those that occupied their tiny American, suburban lives, I became discouraged, heartbroken, and wrecked.

I was keeping up with and reading too many articles that painted a bleak picture of our immediate future and I was internalizing the anguish of our collective souls. I was seeing my friends in pain, confusion, despair.  Every single day.  I'd always come here to find connection I didn't have off line and now on line was threatening my sense of peace, already tenuous, and sending me to the panicked dystopian hell where everyone who looked like me, loved like me, and felt like me would be on the run.  Not even the hedgehogs and kitties and other cute things could save me.

When we got to Barbados my offline life was so unbearable that the retreat into the internets saved my life.  I didn't want to admit that I was startlingly unhappy, suffering from postpartum depression, and realizing I actually knew very little about how to love and be loved and wasn't going to get it from my husband or distant family.  My husband who'd seemed like a charm in New York was distant, unavailable, and overwhelmed in Barbados.  He left me to the care and handling of the home and the children and retreated deeper into his own pathos.  I did not know how to ask for care and comfort in all the ways it might have taken to get it, but I did know how to surround myself in a virtual world with people who would empathize with me, would root for me, pray for me, and wait for me to arrive every day to share.  I needed that love and fought like hell for it no matter its imperfection and its empty promise.   

Life off line is messy and beautiful, hysterical, passionate, and tormented.  There are hours, days, weeks of high energy, high impact, live on stage business that exhaust, rip apart, and tear at the seams of everything.  Whether I am dealing with my daily grind, my midlife struggles, or empathically feeling the torment of human existence, off line I often find myself gasping for air and trying to catch my breath as I see compassion and empathy exit the building.  I've tried to share that on line--my hurts, my hopes, my fears, my anger even, but it often feels too tempered.  I don't fight.  I choose my words carefully.  I listen and acquiesce.  I am imploring, conveying, hoping, and posting about things I love.  My children, fashion, decor, music, art, and all people and especially black people because I love us in our struggles, in our hopes, in our relentless pursuit in the face of unending trauma.  I swear I hope I am convincing, showing, revealing who I am, who we are in every mundane, daily moment, but I don't know. I don't know anymore if I am succeeding in either space.

My life on line is beautiful, I'm not fronting.  We are a photogenic family who take lots of photos of the major and minor adventures in our lives.  There is witty banter and dry, in-the-know wit and humor.  I have always been good with a comeback and can put together good images.  In the face of the funk I can plant flowers and hope.  I love a cute animal doing an insanely cute thing and am extremely passionate about the people, places, and things that I love.  I am a well edited and curated catalog of incidents, moments, and images.  But it is all edited.   An artist edits her work, her writing, her paintings, her collection, her life to tell a more cohesive story.  An unedited showing would be all over the place, full of contradictions, promises and lies and love and fear and darkness and light.  

I hopped off line because I wanted to be in a private space to mourn and I didn't know what to say.  I was hardly able to speak in real life and didn't want to flinch and wince and lie or rant and scream and plead in the place I'd come to seek like minds of the ether, people I know, I've met, and still have to meet.  I ducked out when I wondered what more I had to give or contribute. When I thought I'd nothing else to share or say and that, as I have since I was a young girl begging my parents to see me, shouted myself to hoarseness to no avail.  I bowed out and eventually watched from the sidelines.  I am lonely sometimes.  So lonely.  I am scared and hurt and frustrated that we are not seeing or hearing each other.  That people who have not lived outside of a world of privilege are still leading the conversation about whether or not our lives are even relevant, let alone how to heal all that separates and divides us.  On line or off, I had to admit that I am still watching so much happen on the outside, feeling all of it, and screaming, screaming, screaming my head off in the most polite way.  And I am not sure who can even hear me or gives a damn.



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

Back to the Suburban Grind: 5th: The throwback

Back to the Suburban Grind: 5th: The throwback: And just like that, the summer is over and the girls are back in school.  Sure, we will have a few more weeks of warm weather that will make...

5th: The throwback

And just like that, the summer is over and the girls are back in school.  Sure, we will have a few more weeks of warm weather that will make getting up and spending the day at school complete torture, but the arrival of September means a new start and a season change to fall.  As I got the girls ready for bed last night and for 5th and 2nd grades, the talk inevitably turned to my time in school, and specifically 5th grade as my rising ten year old expressed a little apprehension about it.  Last year had been pure hell for her, and for me, as we tried to work our way through a difficult teacher and the anxiety being in her classroom produced.  I'd stopped pretending 1/2 way through the year and told her that I agreed with her feelings about her teacher but that shit happens, for real, and that you can't stop striving because someone is trying to bring you down.  I meant it.  It is hard to learn that and as hard to teach.

What I remember about my fifth grade class are small fleeting moments.  Memory is like that.  I am not even sure that what I am remembering actually happened in fifth grade and is not an amalgamation of that heady late elementary-middle school block.  My teacher, Mrs. S, was an old school, Southern, pinch-lipped, white biddy who wore skirt suits nearly every day.  Drab colored skirt suits with skirts well below the knee and a mid-sized heel with pantyhose to make her legs look a beigy-tan.  Her hair was coiffed like a cotton candy puff and sprayed so that not a hair moved.  She spoke in that breathy, southern school marm tone that told you she had little time for your shenanigans, even if the shenanigans just meant asking to be excused to use the bathroom.  

This woman brought little to no joy to my life (and I was still of the goody two shoes variety at that time).  She seemed to revel in giving bad grades, marking papers in red, and sucking the life out of the room.  I remember people getting in trouble, especially a boy named Derek who'd surely be diagnosed with ADHD today, and the creaky spot in the floor that I tried to avoid when I walked across the room to sharpen my pencil.  My feet had grown so quickly that year that the only shoes that fit me were women's shoes and styles and I had this pair of wooden clogs with a heel that I wish to God I still had but don't.  I remember that one girl in my class had reached puberty years ahead of the rest of us and that we all, boys and girls alike, obsessively watched her boobs doing what they do.  I remember there were some fast booty girls that were rumored to have been caught kissing sixth and seventh grade boys and that I was both appalled and intrigued.  There were combs in back pockets but I wore my hair in braids.  And I remember for the first time that the school day seemed to go on forever.  Mrs. S was no fun.  In fact, she was as rigid and dry as her old pruney lips announced.  I hated being in her class.  And I hated her.  After that year, thanks to puberty and beauty standards I couldn't meet and a sense of loneliness and isolation, I started to hate myself a little.

I watch my ten year old running up the hill to her elementary school with the other 3rd through 5th graders looking for signs of her sense of worth and value.  I wonder if she pays attention to all the details that now seem my only memory of that time.  All the kids look enthusiastic and eager and too young to think about any of the things I recall about fifth grade.  My ten year old is all curiosity, rainbows, cute animal videos, and pop culture memes that seem to sometimes go over her head.  She is still wearing ponytails and a tank top, no bra-lette.  She is all legs and thanks to the crowning of the kids as king, she has age appropriate footwear and clothing even though her paws are getting big like a growing puppy.  But she is also musical.ly and snapchat photos and silly little texts to her girlfriends on the phone we got her to stay in touch with us on her walk home.  When I ask her if kids talk about love interests or care about their hair and clothing more than they used to, she rolls her eyes at me to tell me that my line of questioning is embarrassing and ridiculous because 'no' or more likely because she cannot imagine that I know how it goes.

Sometimes she tells me about something funny she has seen on line or an app her friends have shared with her.  Other times she brings to me the most adorable, well-crafted stuffed animals that she knitted or sewed with no pattern or guide and I think about how amazing she is, about the talent she has that has absolutely nothing to do with me.  At night, when her most anxious thoughts and fears creep in, she whimpers and whispers her self-doubt into my ear, tells me that she just doesn't know what she wants to be when she grows up and asks if she really has to know right now.  She wonders aloud why a girl in her class is wearing and wants to wear make up and stylish clothes "like an adult" and talks to everyone like she is grown.  She tells me she feels woefully alone and is afraid not of the small details of her life but of the big picture.  How we all got here.  How do we discover what our role is to play on this planet?  What if she just can't find her way?

And I answer.  All of the questions to the best of my ability.  And we talk about the anxiety and self-doubt that she is predisposed to thanks to me, and how she can best navigate it.  I tell her that kids of her generation do things much sooner that we did and we laugh together and agree that yes, she got the teacher that nearly broke her spirit one year before I did.  I tell her about Derek and the girl who developed early, about Mrs. S's sullen way of presenting almost everything.  About how still and quiet and lonely that room felt to me. I tell her about the clicking of my adult sized clogs on the floor and the dreams I had staring out the window.  I told her that I started to believe I couldn't be anything I dreamt of that year, that I started to believe I was not enough.  That the way this teacher spoke of me to my parents and that they did not tell her to 'fuck off' made me wonder if I really needed to work that much harder or if they were just not "getting me."  (At the time I went with work that much harder but now I am not so sure that was the right answer.)

This morning, though I'd offered to let her wear her mane of hair, now blond and brown from the sun, down, my 5th grader still chose ponytails.  She wore high tops and a blouse-y purple top that has a built in tank top so she didn't have to sport an undergarment.  Despite feeling a little under the weather, she decided not to miss the second day of school.  Though she is a little shell-shocked from last year, she is willing to go forward feeling hopeful, accepting this new path and direction.  She knows what she is ready for and what she is not quite yet.  As I pulled up to our drop off spot, I wished her insight and guidance and goodness on this second day.  I told her I'd tell her how I loved her from inside the car so she would not have to be mortified by my beaming pride once out in the real world.  She grabbed her backpack and tightened her safety patrol belt and said, "I want everyone to know that you love me."   She closed the door and got on her path.  I watched as long as I could see her, hoping she would turn to look just one more time.

And she did.


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

Back to the Suburban Grind: Miscarriage of Justice

Back to the Suburban Grind: Miscarriage of Justice: WARNING:  Some graphic imagery of the experience of a miscarriage.   Miscarriage:   failure   to   attain   the   just,   right,   or   de...

Miscarriage of Justice

WARNING:  Some graphic imagery of the experience of a miscarriage.  

Miscarriage:  failure to attain the just, right, or desired result/end; he expulsion of a fetus before it is viable, especially between the third and seventh months of pregnancy

Miscarriage of justice:  
primarily is the conviction and punishment of a person for a crime they did not commit. "Miscarriage of justice" is sometimes synonymous with wrongful conviction, referring to a conviction reached in an unfair or disputed trial.

Before I was pregnant with my second child, I'd suffered two miscarriages.  Just weeks into each pregnancy (the first at five weeks, the second at ten) seemingly no different than the one that had delivered its promise of a baby, my body, ripe and pumping with hormones and an increased blood supply, began to tear the walls down.  My heart skipped a beat and then a small cramp.  I felt nervous and my palms began to sweat.  I believe I was holding my breath.  I didn't want to look, to check.  A small cramp was not entirely uncommon or unexpected.  My body was trying to tell me something I did not want to know.  I knew it and still didn't want to listen.

The cramping began to increase and I was hot.  My skin, plump and swollen, got cold and clammy.  My breasts and nipples already longing to nurture that baby were so sensitive to the touch that it seemed just my clothes were too much.  I felt the longing, the begging, and the pleading.  "Please don't let this be." And then the resolve.  There was blood.  Blood everywhere and I was alone and even when people came to my call, I was alone.  The first time in France in my in-laws' upstairs bathroom on New Year's Eve.  The second time in the apartment I shared with my soon-to-be husband and our first child just weeks shy of the end of the first trimester.  I was at a loss for words.  Everything everyone said to comfort me sounded muffled.  I didn't want them to talk to me.  I wanted them to listen.  To listen to the sound of the moment and it was deafeningly quiet.  It was so real that try as I might to escape in my mind, I was pulled back into the present with each tiny contraction.  A friend of mine, one of my very best, who is also a healer had once said to me, 'we cannot expand and grow all the time.  Sometimes we have to contract.'  That thought kept coming to mind.  I can't say why, but it somehow gave me comfort and the space to accept what was to be.

We wanted another child, a partner and friend for our first, and after meeting with my doctor and receiving the appropriate shots (I have Rh negative (Rhesus negative) blood which means that my blood is most likely not compatible with the blood of the baby and certain precautions have to be taken), we decided to try again.  My husband was hopeful and to some degree disconnected from the emotional and spiritual effort it was going to take to get back out there.  Encouraged by the all clear from my doctor, he was eager to start the baby-making!  I was more apprehensive.  The losses had been traumatic, terrifying, and exhaustively lonely.  I did indeed want to have another baby but was so scared to lose another.  The sense memories, smells, tingles, ringing in my ears, the muscle memory of loss pulled tightly at my core.  My heart and gut wrenched, my palms became sweaty, I was nervous and easily agitated and very short tempered.

I didn't watch either of the videos.  We came home from the day-late Independence Day fireworks to our cable, phone, and internet service not working.  It turned out to be a blessing.  As I did a quick review of the latest on social media on my phone I saw the first hashtag:  #ripaltonsterling.  It wasn't difficult to put the pieces together to see what had happened.  I knew better than to even try to watch the video on my phone.  Already I was shaking.  My heart and gut wrenched and my palms were sweaty.  I looked to posts from my 'woke' friends.  I was in a panic.  Piecing together small details--selling CDs, concealed carry state, gun in his pocket, point blank range, black, black, black, black, black.  I knew guys who sold CDs on the street.  Hell, I'd bought some back in the day when I didn't know better and could scarcely afford a good meal let alone my favorite music.

Like with the first cramp suffered in the upstairs bathroom, I stood alone.  I didn't even want to say the words out loud.  I looked down.  Blood.  Real, thick, dark.  Pulled into the present.  This is happening.  From the bathroom, "Honey, something is wrong."  And now from the bedroom, barely whispered, "They killed another black man on the street."  The depth of our disconnect even more expanded, there was no answer.  "A man.  Selling CDs.  Pinned down and shot at point blank range."  My husband looked up. "No.  Can't be.  How they can do that?"  Nervous, easily agitated, short tempered.  I had to move, walk around.  I knew not to try to watch the video, the video!  I knew that I was suddenly very alone.

Retreating to my bed, to sleep, seemed the best option and I took some melatonin to disappear and went in.  When I woke up to the news of the murder of Philando Castile, a young, black man who'd been shot and killed in the driver seat of his car as he'd reached for his permit to show the officer who'd demanded it, I blanched.  That his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, and his child had also been in the car and that his girlfriend had live streamed his death, dropped me to the floor.  Again, I did not watch the video but saw a still.  The blood.  The thick, dark blood on a white t-shirt on a man sitting in the driver's seat of his car.  The scene was haunting, surreal.

I looked down and took stock of my surroundings.  That hyper-awareness that trauma brings.  I see the floor, the walls, my feet.  There is so much blood.  I smell the food cooking downstairs.  I see the whites of my eyes gleaming with tears and fear.  I see blood.  A miscarriage.  A failure to achieve a desired end.  I'm still standing.  I sit and try to breathe deeper breaths than the shallow, panicked wisps that are leaking out of me like cold winter smoke rings.  All the moments I've ever looked at my feet, my hands, my face, the floor, the wall come rushing to me.  I am pulled back to the present.

They have killed another black man in the street.  There was no trial, no accusation (none formal at least).  This was not justice.  It is not just.  There has been a rush to find fault in these two men as has been done countless times before.  I have taken stock of my surroundings.  I stare down at my hands and at my feet.  I see the walls, the floor.  This has all happened before and before me and before them and before all of us.  That in a public court of opinion these men cannot be found innocent of a crime they did not commit because by being black they are guilty.  There is a lot of talk about it.  Too much for me right now because I need the sound of the moment in its deafening quiet.  I need there to be listening.

When we'd passed fifteen weeks during my pregnancy with the little one I felt safe enough to tell people that we were pregnant, but the panic never stopped. I checked between my legs daily.  I responded to gas, fullness, fatigue with worry and panic.  I prayed and chanted and mantra-d from point to point.  I was afraid and I was hopeful.  We can do this, I thought.  We have before.  She wants to stay with us.  She wants to be our baby.  The gods are shining on us.  They want her to be ours too.  But until she was in my arms, peering up at me with those shiny, black eyes, I was prepared for the worst. Prepared to lose her, prepared to suffer and hurt and feel anguish in silence.  Silence because looking at me in my hurt was too much for most to bear.

It is hard to watch someone in excruciating pain.  It is hard to watch them writhe and twist and ache so deeply internally that their body contorts, the way they appear on the outside is hideous to behold, their faces change, their destinies are missed, their paths misdirected.  We fear pain like the dark hand of misfortune.  We don't want it to touch us too so we turn from it, intellectualize it, talk and talk and talk about it, analyze it, describe it, try to work around it but it can only be confronted deep inside.  It is bloody and dark and thick.  It is slow and gruesome and sudden.  It throbs and burns and pulls.  And then gives release.  

The tiny space within me that I keep my deepest fears and secrets burst at the seams and I cried for days, endlessly.  I'd heard that the little four year in the car, in the back seat, where I now strapped my two children, tried to comfort her mother as her father lay dying in the driver's seat.  I'd heard that Diamond Reynolds was taken into custody and I wondered where her tiny girl was taken.  I wept at the thought of the rushing, the fast moving, the approach with with Alton Sterling was met in those last moments.  Wondered if he said to himself, 'this is just like that guy...' before someone put a gun to his chest.  I could not stop crying as I thought about all the blood and its metallic smell, its dankness, its thick, tacky swell as it flowed from the body.  I would wipe my eyes and more tears would come thinking of the moments in stillness when even though there was sound and screaming and fury, for a split second the dead silence of that present moment froze the world.  *gasp* And then it was done.

I remember the heaviness of the blood, the weight on my shoulders, the pulling in my heart, believing I could never recover from a loss like this.  One that had been a secret, one that was private, one that was mine to mull and cultivate.  And I came to see, I have to tell you.  I have to tell you that these are not just stories on white paper.  They are not clean or neat or easily filed.  They are real life.  The just, right, desired end was that I would bear another child and bring her into this world and love her and have every right to share with her and show her and celebrate with her the beauty of this human experience.  I hope I can.  The just, right, desired end would be that two men, black men, who had every right, so it is said, to share and celebrate the beauty of our shared human experience would not be dead because they'd been unfairly tried and convicted because they were black.

It's incredible this life.  And heartbreaking.  Black lives matter. Too.  



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