my thousandth visit
just as pretty as the first
brings peace to my stress
and seeing her run
beating her time on day two
goose wings to the sky
stress
Cross Country
weekend leftovers
murmur an early Monday
in my groaning gut
technology blues
plague two classes, one meeting
forced into nonsense
data collection
begins my singular plan
till phone rings: sick kid
frazzled packing up
for a stomach flu faker
then two extra kids
but that is not all!
cross country registration
at the last moment
my middle girl runs!
two days a week, a new plan:
laps around the park
(he can cook dinner–
we’ll eat late like back in Spain,
shed this U.S. stress)
and i will run too–
take tree-lined tech-free views home
(run free, not ragged)
Two Too Many
end of day feet up
hours on end of walking
then pickup, dinner…
day two of two jobs
the runaround’s new to me
exhaustion takes time
the girls say it best:
hang the dolls on bike rack noose
and call it a day
Anywhere but Here
with windows wide: write.
because you’ve missed my poems, love.
since yesterday’s dawn
girls in sun’s shadow
as she announces her move.
life: cycle in, out.
you know you’ve missed me
my “seven-likes” followers
’cause i didn’t write
you count me daily
amongst the regular loves
that make us a life
and i was just born.
(it was like i was just born
the day i met him)
’cause seventeen years
can’t be measured in mountains
or wildflowers
or whining children.
but in the steps we oft take
on our way back home
and in sunsets. Sun!
lighting my way across love
across city, life.
cutting down this ‘hood
into what it’s meant to be:
scraped, demolished, lost.
circular i am
because that’s how tires spin:
neverending globe
that brings us back home
wherever that home may be.
anywhere but here.
Nino’s Antiques
home: car cleaning bribe
so i can get my work done
and they earn their game
insurance battle
because i won’t be bullied
by corporations
i wash out bottles
and my new/old egg beater
from Nino’s Antiques
(the shop in Gorham
i went to as a child
with just two pennies
and Nino emerged
with his wax-curled mustache
and sold me his goods
and this egg beater
will remind me: he’s still there
in my timeless town
his mustache now gray
asking my girls about school
his PBS on
selling his antiques
for much too little money
and chatting with kids
he’s no CEO
no insurance scam artist
my hometown hero)
Day Sixteen, Road Trip 2015
small town tire delay
gives us reason for lobster
(just a short Maine walk)
two missed turns later
we find winding New Hampshire
ready for ice cream
fixed reservation
at a camp we’ve never seen
top out my Monday
late night text shocker:
best sleeping bag left in Maine
(adventure goes on)
we find our way back
on lobster walks, ice cream runs
till we feel at home
that’s how the road plays:
missed turns, rushed escape attempts
journeys everywhere
Because Riona Would.
All three of my children were born in the evening. If you are a mother, you can acknowledge the significance of this. They were twenty-one months apart, so when I had my third, my oldest was just three and a half.
The first two spent their first night in and out of my arms, crying because of a reaction to the pain medication I’d taken during labor or because she was THAT starving.
But Riona?
I barely heard a sound from her… for EVER.
She lay next to me in the bed for all of that first night. She murmured a little, nursed a little, and settled back into sleep, happy to be near me.
And so it began. The ending of my motherhood with the child who came into the world as peaceful as a lamb.
And that is why I am crying now. Because you didn’t take a moment to see her. To listen to her soft calls, to her murmurs in the night. Because you thought an eight-almost-nine-year-old’s protests meant nothing.
What you. DON’T UNDERSTAND. Is that SHE never protests. She gives in. She listens to her older sisters’ whims and plays along, whether she really wants to or not. She fits into the jealous eye of her eldest sister, who often teases her because “no one can ever be as nice as Riona.” She is just like her father, same birth sign and all: born with a pure heart, giving, generous, willing to sacrifice all for the love of those around her.
Riona is the one who, back in March, cried herself to sleep because I told her we couldn’t afford camp this year. Riona is the reason I have sacrificed four weeks of my summer for summer school and home visits and Spanish class, all in the futile hope that I could pay for that one week of camp for all three girls.
So. NO. I do NOT want to hear that you “lost” her paperwork, sent in the SAME envelope as my other two daughters. I don’t want to come back from 50 hours of class in 5 days to hear that my youngest daughter was told she was leaving on Tuesday, was not allowed to participate in any camp activities because of this even though she ADAMANTLY TOLD YOU SHE WAS LEAVING ON FRIDAY AND YOU NEVER CALLED US TO CHECK, was told her camp store account was EMPTY WHEN SHE HAD $16 DOLLARS LEFT AND COULD HAVE BOUGH CHAPSTICK FOR HER DRIED LIPS, or that she was just… some other eight-year-old.
Because she’s not. If you could see her, really see her, for the gentle soul that she is, you would understand why I can’t stop crying. You would understand why I have given up half of my summer for my daughters to have the experience that you have now stripped from her. You would understand that a protest from a small voice should be THE LOUDEST PROTEST YOU HAVE EVER HEARD.
But you are not a mother. You are eighteen years old and have yet to learn the reality of this kind of pain.
And that is why I forgive you. Because Riona would.
The Buck that Burns Across My Back
It is 14:52 on the eve of ESL summer school. We have spent an entire day, AN ENTIRE DAY, planning for a sixty-five-minute lesson from curriculum that we first laid our eyes on this morning after a completely different and unrelated ENTIRE DAY presentation of curriculum yesterday. And at this moment, he announces that tomorrow, for the first day, the schedule will be “different.” That all our lesson planning has just been flushed down the toilet that has become our society.
I cried on my two-mile walk this morning. Not because it was too hot, or the views of the Perfect Denver Neighborhood weren’t impeccable. Or because I had to teach summer school for four weeks to pay for summer camp for my girls for ONE. But because of an article I read about the University of Phoenix, of all things. About how, in five years, their enrollment has decreased by fifty percent. And starting July 1st, a new law will require that they prove that their graduates make enough money to pay back the loans that their for-profit greed has forced them to take.
I was thinking these things as I made my way across town to the locale of this year’s grant-funded summer school, the University of Denver, a NONprofit institution with gorgeous grounds and transgender bathrooms and air conditioning and classes that start at $1200 a CREDIT.
And how screwed I am. Not because I think that the University of Phoenix is so damn amazing that it could grind up the 100-year-old trees of Denver’s “Ivy League of the West.” But because I have to do this. I have to do this damn summer school and have a part time job as an adjunct-but-never-real professor, that I have to bend my will to the beck and call of disorganized, incapable-of-communicating administrators, all for the buck that burns across my back.
That the measly $600 that I sometimes earn in a month at the University of Phoenix is sometimes all that keeps us from bowing down to debt.
And when he comes in at 13:33 and tells me that they haven’t been able to contact more than 11 students for our summer school, I ask him if it will be cancelled, if I will be shit out of luck on all counts this Tuesday. “No worries… it’s already accounted for… a grant. No pasa nada.” And his blue eyes and Argentinian accent are slappable. “And who paid for it?” I demand, the third time in two months I’ve asked, a question he’s dodged until this moment. “Well… you have. The taxpayers. The READ Act.”
And it all circles back to me. The University of Denver grounds I stand on that have been manicured by professional gardeners. The school I could never afford to attend, nor will any of my children even think of applying to. The public education that is filled and funded with so many holes, twenty-seven gorgeous textbooks, full-color photos and activities galore, a slew of classroom supplies including an electric pencil sharpener, that 11 students will take advantage of … all the rest? To waste.
The “for-profit” evil University of Phoenix that has allowed my family to break free of the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle that is a teacher’s salary, that allowed us to live on a pittance in Spain, that has allowed me to… breathe.
What is an education worth? Why won’t parents commit to a forty-five minute bus ride for free materials, expert teachers, individualized classes, and free breakfast and lunch? Why won’t the University of Denver be asked to publish data on how many students graduate with a super-fancy psychology degree and start their salaries at $22,000? Why won’t our government ever just see that EDUCATION SHOULD BE FREE??
This is my Tuesday. Let the games begin. The Hunger Games, real world style.
It Never Gets Easier
to think i once heard
babies are hard to manage
eat, shit, drink, sleep, cry?
let’s try on costumes–
fall party, field trip, grades due
count how our days go:
back-talk homework fight
second piano practice
three girls showering
second failing math??
not a word from failed teacher
guilt, failing parents
baby barely writes
always a Daddy story
spells like a Spaniard
oldest keeps me up
stressed– her chronic detention
Daddy leaves in huff
garbage disposal
fix in the house that plagues us
that we cannot sell
let me stack my plate
with conferences tomorrow
Spanish class Thursday
Halloween Friday
filled with makeup and drinking
(i need a disguise)
to hide from this life
this balancing act of love
we call parenthood
Drowning
i’m underwater
barely able to breathe
so stop trying to talk to me.
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