The Dude Abides

twilight by nick higgins

There is a pause that began when Ever went into the hospital with RSV and has not let out it's breath. I had a baby. I had a sick baby. She wasn't all right. She's all right now. For now. As long as I keep a close eye on her breathing and make sure she's not moving toward not all right. She rubs her open fingered hand across the front of her brow and the side of her ear until she covers her eye with five fingers and in that tiny fat hand my heart is and she has smashed it all over her face and there it remains. There is a tethered balloon of my head smiling and I carry it around with me and people talk to me and I want to pull the balloon in front of my face and say talk to the balloon but that would be weird. My hormones are bad because I have wacky female hormones, worse than your typical girl, hence the endometriosis, and after I have a baby I get sad and silent. A great vacuum comes along and sucks all of my brains out and it's mouth is shaped like a breast feeding baby. I think very little. Yolanda encouraged me think Maggie think because she is a passionate artist intellectual poet goddess and sometimes, so am I, but after a baby I am something else. I am porous. This is part of the seasons. I have seasonal osmosis. I am not responding because I have not been given the proper weather conditions. I am buried but the soil is very rich.

Mothers, good mothers, create richness for their children to experience. Richness can be created in many ways but the important factor is that it exists. Not it's face or it's accent or if it has two dollars or two hundred thousand. After I have a baby I am creating richness. I am tilling. I am absorbing. I am abiding in a body. I am working out and walking and - I am resting so that when the moment comes along when the sun opens at a certain shining angle and hits the top of my head so that a circular portion of my scalp begins to rise with astounding heat I can respond in the way intended by springing open with the rest of Nature and beginning the months of creativity.

Meanwhile I am reading. And bringing flowers to M across the street whose father died; she is my favorite neighbor and I've been bringing her daughter R home from school with Lola and I watch their house quiet down for mourning. And praying for many people because illness and death seem around every corner lately. Katie Mcrae is very ill with her cancer and her parents covet prayers so please pray for her small shining self. Lola's friend's dad just died of pneumonia and so we pray for their family and I am thinking I want to bring them a meal but we have no working oven so I have to think what to bring. Dakota's new girlfriend's mom has terminal breast cancer and I keep feeling like I should.... something- but what? What is appropriate for your son's new girlfriend's ill mother you've never met? Maybe nothing but prayer. Kate, Henry's mom, is working in a veritable frenzy for justice for her son and I hope you all continue to leave comments on her blog because it's such a small thing we can do that might really help her. As Robert Stolorow said here in what is now one of my favorite quotes:

I have long contended that the mangling and the darkness can be enduringly borne, not in solitude, but in relationships of deep emotional understanding. In such relationships, we do not encourage the traumatized person to "get over it and move on." Instead, we dwell with him or her in his or her endlessly recurring emotional pain, so that he or she is not left unbearably alone in it.
Because this is one of the exact principles that saved my marriage when Mr. Curry got sick with Bipolar, and because Mr. Curry abides with me in the darkness when it comes, we have found in each other a great sanctuary. Of course no one can stay all the hours and feel all the feelings. But a lover or a friend who will go there with you and hold space with you, even if it's uncomfortable, painful, scary? Irreplaceable.
Thank you for the title of this post.