Where The Wild Things Are

Every ordinary day begins with the extraordinary fact of life, my own strange and intense and wild conciousness, physical body, the fluxing and working of my heartbeat on the soft of my arm as I fall asleep; the life of this world, it's trees bending in stillness and dance, the bacteria rich soil underneath, the flowers and weeds and plants and large mountains around town, the birds that caw and scrape through the streets, the racoons and coyotes and rabbits, trying to find space for their lives amidst dense suburbia; the lives of my children, the miracle that remains a miracle no matter how many times it is duplicated and experienced, that one body and another body come together and by three months along, an entirely new person with fingernails and legs and eyes and ears and legs that bend and stretch exists deep in the abdomen of the woman: the last miracle, my unborn baby, 12 weeks along, as vigorous and lively and beautiful as the sluice of bird wing through the Spring air, the tremble of wind on leaf, the stamp of my daughter's foot in
puddle.

The First Trimester Screening went easily, 20 minutes of movie viewing for Mr. Curry and I, watching our Biggie Pea kick, bring arms above the head, roll over, push the tiny feet against my uterus in a perfect picture of every bone in the foot. My thyroid is underperforming again, so I'll be upping my dose tonight. All other indicators are good.

The normal for me has always been excrutiating, a fact that absolutely works against a functioning mature adult life. I can guess at my calamatious childhood and it's constant tremulous swingings- the dramatic fights with my parents where my father threw fruit baskets and pots against the wall, screaming, my mother locking herself in her room, also screaming, crying. The constant moving, the evictions, the marriage on the edge of divorce but never falling through until the girls were 17 and 15, already a childhood lived. The poverty, the lonliness, the isolation, the lying, the cruelty. The stories of my parents great love, in the beginning. Thier passion. As a child these things are taken in and received as Communion and forever after you can tell yourself it is not what it was, while your blood boils and believes you not. As an person, I have always craved the elevated, the shaft of light on my face, the eruption of laughter, the timeless love, the absolute convictions, the bright intelligence, the painful struggles.

Every move toward stability- being on time, working the same job, having children, sticking in a marriage, eating the same healthy foods, taking the same healthy vitamins, brush teeth, spit, shower, rinse, repeat- it has taken me my entire adult life to find joy in this. Looking as hard as I possibly could until my eyes teared, to see the possibilities of joy. Reading has been, as always, a great help and equalizer. Lives unseen by me but still experienced and understood, inner workings explained.

I work, I come home, I rest, I clean, I parent, I love, I do as we all do, and this Biggie Pea rides on those calmer seas. I can find wild things, I can make wild things, in bed, with my children, on weekends, in mud puddles and sunshine and beaches and showers and midnight hours and novels and art and singing and whispering and even the fighting and worrying and frustration.