cherry alive

it's working, however weird and crazy it makes me feel. sort of has me wanting giant needles penetrating many parts of me. if two tiny nubs prodding at my wrists can have me this improved, imagine what ten or twenty carefully and precisely inserted needles might do.
it's snapped me back to reality. so i can get through the day, so i can manage the minutia of my mornings, so i can arise more pleasant, so i can do a load of laundry.
they responded so unexpectedly, so pleasantly, teaching me yet again how very little i understand about them and the value of setting distinctive boundaries and warning people against crossing them. nothing could have prepared me for love you no matter what. maybe they've realized their mortality? she's obviously been charting the years. maybe with each white hair and facial crease, with each new organic failure, he's charting his, too, beginning to appreciate that his time with each of us is preciously finite.
as i get multiple messages for vacation packages, i am increasingly inclined to flit away. barcelona haunts me. i want to go back. i want to get away. the holiday stuff, the pressure, the discussions are gnawing me. fresh traditions are so welcome. christmas in europe might be okay; christmas in mexico could be amazing. christmas in swarthmore, trying to type, trying to finish will have to suffice. it needs to get done so i can move on.
she told me a story about her son that broke my heart--how he refuses to hug her, ducks down in the car when she drops him off at school so no one sees that she's his mom. i hope when i have a little boy he will still request and welcome his mama's hugs when he's tall and hairy and gruff. i hope my little boy would love me like he seems to love his mom: unabashedly. but then i hope my little girl will love me when she starts plucking her brows and shaving her legs, provoking boys and smearing her lipstick. she is a cancer, too, and she will never be controlled, but i hope she'll still be willing to let her crab-ish mother into the carefully guarded aperture of her tough shell. and hug.
i am the sahara, guzzling water, never getting wet. i just wish it weren't also dripping from the sky. he deserves a more celebratory day.
the size of a cherry today with paddles for limbs and external ear buds. supposedly, now moving spontaneously, though there's nothing large enough for me to feel. she's in maternity wear already and it's a matter of weeks for me. i didn't expect such rapid expansion, but my pregnancy expectations have all proven rather flawed. time to roll more, devise less.
cherry: losing mine on his hand in his bedroom with his mother upstairs, arguing, and his brothers in the next room, nintendoing, was not what i expected it to be. and then i learned i'd never really lost it. not until her. not until we were already faded, clinging and he'd long since forgotten the trickle of my blood through his decorated fingers. so much surfacing from the baby in my belly, the anticipation of july 28, the implication of her message. she remembers distinctly what i remember vaguely. that's why she responded so frantically, why she pounced protectively, why she cringed when she thought of another obstetrical bout for me. i give her so little credit. she did love me. hard. when i most needed it. and i loved her back like crazy.
somewhere i stopped needing her love and she started feeling rejected, like she'd lost her daughter, like her daughter didn't respect her, like her daughter went away to an ivory tower where she finally discovered that her mother wasn't the entire world, that her mother fucked things up, too, and badly, that her mother didn't know as much as she liked to pretend she did. and she felt threatened. so we fell apart. like we fell apart when suddenly i had boobs and wanted tampons and she didn't know what to do. pseudo-motherhood has me incessantly occupied with her, earth mother, my mother, for a time my friend. she still loves me. she's just had to let me go and accept that we may never understand each other, all while still secretly hoping that when she's ancient and surrounded by cats listening to cold play and old bob marley, wearing her hair is an unruly, massive white 'fro, i'll come visit her and we will suddenly, instantaneously click. i don't know what she'll do if i get published. if it weren't mine, she'd love the work. since it's mine, it could kill her. sometimes she's so strong, others so feeble.