It wasn’t mine, either.
My son found it this winter
on the orchard floor.
The orchard wasn’t ours anymore.
But when we left from visiting the new owners,
we put the thin celled scrap
on the dash of my car
and left it there.
The wasps, it wasn’t really theirs, either.
They gathered the fibers
from dead wood and plant stems
and mixed it with their saliva.
And I suppose we could say
that the plants and trees
had taken from the soil,
the sun, the rain.
My teacher says
everything you love
can and will be taken from you.
For a long time, that felt
like a curse until
it began to feel like freedom—
not the losses themselves,
but the acceptance of loss.
It’s not that I loved
the brown paper wasp nest,
though it did remind me
of that day when we walked
on the rails and no trains came
and my son sang for an hour
at the top of his lungs.
Add this to the list
of the things that cannot be owned.
The song. The memory.
The boy. The land.
A sense of security.
The open, empty combs.
Posts Tagged ‘mothering’
To the Person Who Stole the Paper Wasp Nest from my Dashboard
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged loss, mothering, paper wasp, poem, poetry, theft on April 26, 2013| 1 Comment »
Just When I Think I Know
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged doubt, lie, mothering, poem, truth on April 9, 2013| 1 Comment »
I do not believe him
when he says he sees
the sea turtle. But there
it is, like a giant round of driftwood,
disappearing into the turquoise
waves and unkempt white froth.
And there another.
It is so hard to know
what to do when
we doubt
is proved to be true.
Now what to do
the next time I know
he is lying or exaggerating.
Already, he is swearing
he sees the gray whales
off the dark cliffs and already
I feel that flock of doubts
rise up and swarm my thoughts.
So human, I tell myself,
to question him, so human
to want to believe.
I don’t know, I tell him,
that seems unlikely.
My eyes scan the tousled sea.
Lost in Motherland: Writing to discover who we are(n’t)
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged mothering, ridgway, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, weehawken, writing workshop on March 4, 2013| 1 Comment »
SUNDAY, MARCH 10
Ridgway, Colorado
10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
970-318-0150
Motherhood changes things. Amidst the blessings and the challenges, we transform. As one mother put it, “With my first child, I lost my interests. With my second child, I lost my identity.” How do we lean into motherhood’s paradoxical blend of miracle and loss? Writing can help. As James Pennebroke writes in Opening Up, writing “clears the mind” and helps us “understand and reorient our complicated lives” and “helps keep our psychological compass oriented.”
In this program, mother and writer Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer leads other mothers in a writing practice that includes a lot more than just writing. What happens when we ask, “Who am I?” As Ramana Maharshi says, “The purpose of that question is not to find an answer but to dissolve the questioner.” What’s that supposed to mean? Come play.
Every kind of mother is welcome-from prenatal to step to great grandmother. No previous writing experience necessary.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, mother of Finn (8) and Vivian (4) and stepmother of Shawnee (29), is the award-winning author of numerous poetry collections. Her work has appeared in O Magazine, Prairie Home Companion and Mountain Gazette. For 10 years she directed the Telluride Writers Guild. Her favorite one-word mantra: Adjust.
For more information, visit https://activenet006.active.com/weehawkenarts/servlet/adet.sdi;jsessionid=WbRpyZzd0ScL1Ly+P+TNxTgsR2M?activity_id=899&show_all=&pagenum=3&paid=&online=true
So We Read to Page Thirty-Six
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged children, James and the Giant Peach, literacy, mothering, poem, poetry on January 24, 2013| 2 Comments »
By page twenty, things
have not gotten better.
Vivian clenches into my ribs.
She does not seem to breath,
as if her silence might help
the young boy with the two
evil aunts who beat him,
rebuke him, and lock him up.
Finn, curled into my other side,
twists at the hem of his blue and gray
flannel pajamas and fidgets
with a pillow’s edge. We are all
hoping for something miraculous
to happen, and soon. Something wonderful.
Something to stop all this
sinking we’re feeling. By page twenty-six,
things are still not better
and it is long past bedtime
and I cannot stop reading
until there is something brighter
to end the night. I can feel in this
chapter of dulled hatchets
and threats, how I want to offer
my boy and my girl
not just happily ever after,
but happily now. Though I also feel
how even this now, with the boy in the book
tripping and spilling all of his magic
into the ground and the aunts hurling “wretched” at him,
and “miserable” and “twerp,”
there is something here more than
happy, something that straddles
real and unreal, the three of us curled so closely
into each other, so warm and still
trembling at the edge of despair.
It is like that feeling of falling
right before sleep, and you don’t know
where you will land, or when,
are you really falling? could it hurt?
only this time we’re falling together.
Grace
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged acceptance, aging, mothering, parenting, poem, poetry, self love, softness on October 27, 2012| 5 Comments »
Bless the softness of the body,
and bless how I have struggled so long
against being soft. I have tried to be hard,
to be firm, to be fit, to be thin, I have tried
to disappear. And after the hiking, the climbing,
the swimming, the crunching, the pushing
the lifting, the drive, comes
softness. Comes breathing,
the whole soft body breathing,
belly and chest and cheek and neck,
in and out, so softly, pure gift, with
no effort of my own. Comes softness.
My daughter this morning curls her small weight
into me and I try to make myself softer,
softer than that, soft enough
to embrace the growing miracle.
I have tried to be something other
than soft, and now, by grace, I am learning to soften,
to appreciate softening, oh beautiful
softness, oh softness I’ve hated,
I am learning to bless what is soft.
Games We Play
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged capture, escape, illusion, imagination, mothering, poem, poetry, pretend, prison on October 8, 2012| 2 Comments »
For an hour today, she practices escaping
from the stairs. There is no jail here,
only our pretense of bars. She,
the bank robber. I the police.
I lock her up again with my invisible
jail cell key. Then I swallow the key,
I throw it away, but she always produces another,
an invisible skeleton key she’s been hiding
somewhere around her and she lets
herself out again, then hovers nearby
to be caught. I feign dismay. She’s
escaped, again! And search for her,
looking right through her. Until,
aha! I say, and grab her. She never
struggles much, almost hurls her body
at me to be caught. So similar to
how I want to be held, forever,
I say, and then the next moment
I long for escape. Oh sweet
imagination, how real it all can seem,
like this girl slipping away from the stairs,
saying for the fourteenth time, catch me again.
September 11
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birth story, love, mothering, parenting, poem, September 11 on September 11, 2012| 9 Comments »
On this night
she tells the story
of eight years ago,
how the boy who was growing
inside of the woman for eight months decided
this day, this September day devoted to singing
and dancing and chanting for peace,
how this day he chose to arrive.
How gold the aspen were on the drive
to the midwife. How blue, how deeply blue
the sky as she curled her toes into the dashboard
and choked between clenchings how she hadn’t thought
it would hurt this much. How she thought, “Not today,
not today, not today, of course today, of course today,
of course.“ How the man sat beside her bed
and held her hand and hummed a one-note tone as she pushed
the new life forth. How the room smelled of lily,
and how she had moaned into the beautiful
violence that split her and crowned the boy,
his dark hair wet, his hands so small.
How the man had caught the boy as he flew
into the air and the terrible light, how he whispered
to her, it’s a boy. How the woman had held the naked weight
on her belly and sang him into the world
with words the trees had given her:
in you swells the breath of the universe
you have a body made of love
in you dwells the spirit of your ancestors
in your life you’ll always have enough
And how eight years later how fine he had grown,
so loving, so beloved, so … oh, she cannot tell
the story anymore through her tears, they are happy
and endless and broken and whole, and they fall to the bed
where the eight year old boy reaches up to hold her.
He wipes her tears with the green
and white blanket he’s slept with since
that September day. He wraps it around
her shoulders and holds her and kisses her forehead
again and again, and no more words are said.
Will You Stand at the Door for Me?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fear, ghost story, insecurity, love, mothering, parenting, poem, poetry on August 13, 2012| 3 Comments »
I try to tell him
it’s a story.
That Bloody Mary
is only imaginary.
That she cannot hurt him.
Still he insists that I
go with him to the bathroom.
“Cuz Mom, that’s where she kills you,”
he says. “That’s what they told me at camp.”
I hold his hand on the way there,
then stand guard at the door.
It is sweet, in its way,
his fear. So innocent.
So pure. I try to be
this compassionate
with myself, later,
thinking you no longer love me,
telling myself, that’s just
my imagination. Though
the prick of it, the
way I deflate, it feels
so real.
Hand in Hand
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fear, light, love, mothering, parenting, shadow on August 7, 2012| 6 Comments »
Please, says Vivian,
come into my room with me.
She tugs on my shirt.
It’s my shadow,
she says, it is following me,
and he is mean,
he is every word for mean.
Her eyes blink slow.
Her face holds my face.
Is it a boy? I ask her,
confused by her pronouns,
and she tells me, No,
it’s a girl changing into a boy.
I do not understand
and it doesn’t matter.
I hold her in the small room
where the light is diffuse
and our shadows,
whatever they are,
wait for us outside the door
along with everything
that shines.
So Much For the Honey Badger Approach to Mothering Tanka
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged arguing, mothering, separation, tall poppies, tanka on June 22, 2012| 3 Comments »
he pushes and he
pushes and he pushes and
he pushes and I
push back and we both topple
tall poppies hacked at the stem
Butterfly Effect
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, butterfly, freedom, imprisonment, mothering, parenting, poem, poetry on June 21, 2012| 3 Comments »
Finn comes in, hands cupped
and asks me for a jar. What for?
I ask, and he lets me peek between
his palms to see the butterfly.
He is all aglow with the catching of it,
and I do not try to hide my regret.
Let it go, I say, it will be so much happier, love.
No, he shouts, and looks about
for a jar since I won’t help him out.
Please Finn, I say, let it go,
but he is intent on keeping
what is beautiful. He pokes holes
in the lid so the admiral can breathe,
gives it a yellow salsify and insists
that it’s sipping nectar. The butterfly,
all violent wing, flaps a long time before
settling beside the pretty weed.
Finn stares in the jar at his butterfly.
It is pure, his admiration for the
loveliness he sees, so pure that I squeeze him
tight, too tight perhaps, my arms
around the place he would have wings.
Winging It
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged flight, mothering, poem, Rumi, unlearning on May 23, 2012| 5 Comments »
What will our children do in the morning if they do not see us fly?
—Rumi, “The Way Wings Should,” translated by Daniel Ladinsky
Dear Rumi,
You tell me to fly, to cartwheel
around the sky, to soar, to reel,
to spiral in the wind. But
there is a nest and two hungry mouths
and two bodies not yet fully feathered.
It’s easy enough for you to advise
I should let my heart play,
as you say, “the way
wings should.” You
probably had someone else
at your nest to care for your
young while you unfurled
your wings and wheeled with Shams
and felt the joy of rising.
Perhaps I am too literal.
Perhaps you mean later in life.
Perhaps you mean bit by bit.
Perhaps you mean fly in this moment,
wherever I am. Perhaps you mean
I have put too much of a cage
on the word “should,”
have limited notions
of what flying looks like.
I thought I knew what wings
should do. But maybe this letting
go of what I thought I needed,
perhaps this, too, is flight.
Bliss Except When It Is Not
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged children, Christmas, ideal, jingle bells, mothering, poem, tree, what is real on December 18, 2011| 3 Comments »
We took a ride
in a one horse open
sleigh today,
and I was one horse
and the red sled
was the open sleigh
and the kids laughed
and reeled as we
trudged through
the field and
searched for the perfect
Christmas tree,
which was not
hard to find.
The noon sun, it caught
in large facets of snow
and we sang, “o’er the fields
we go, laughing …”
but just as we got
to the laughing part
and I was belting
“Ho ho ho,”
the kids began kicking
each other and throwing
snow in each other’s faces
and tipping the red sled
so that they tumbled out
not giggling at all
but shrieking,
“I hate you! Go away!”
And this is how
the bliss goes,
sometimes it looks
a lot like bliss
and sometimes
no.
What’s in a Dream?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged be here now, mothering, poem, reality vs. dreams, shoveling, snow on December 4, 2011| 3 Comments »
Most people have had not honored even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made.
—Bronnie Ware, Top Five Regrets of the Dying
Three inches of chicken feathers
fell overnight, and my son,
still dressed in blue striped pajamas,
went scampering out
to move snow. We moved
snow for an hour. Two hours?
We moved snow from one place
to another. We moved snow
and moved more snow.
Whose dream is that?
To move snow? But between
the stripes of asphalt and white
the morning filled in
with the richest laughter.
No reason to laugh except
we were shoveling and the snow
was light and the sky was gray
and it looked, hallelujah,
as if it might snow some more
so that we could keep moving
together outside, warm
and breathless and choosing
to shovel, to move piles of snow
joyfully from one place to another.
Losing the Self
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged lost tooth, mothering, poem on November 29, 2011| 1 Comment »
The boy tugs
on the tooth,
it hangs
by the root,
I hang
on his joy
oh gaping
beamish budding
boy.
And What is it that I Call Mine?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged imagination, mine, mothering, possessive on November 4, 2011| 2 Comments »
Not today, I said,
no snacks in the car for kids
who don’t eat their breakfast,
but here, I said,
and extended my empty right hand
to the back seat, Here
are some pretend snacks.
On the radio, Cake
was singing a song
about wanting
to love someone madly
when my son shouted, Mine,
and my daughter burst, Mine,
and a strident battle ensued
and real tears began
to splash on invisible
snacks being snatched
and seized by four empty,
grasping, hands.
Still in the Mud Phase Tanka
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged mothering, spiritual path, tanka on September 28, 2011| 1 Comment »
At seven, my son
knows everything.
His mother? She’s practicing
to be like a gulley
guttered after a flood
Accordion Tanka
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged mothering, tanka, time passing on September 7, 2011| 2 Comments »
was it this morning
or six years ago
the little boy
asking with both arms
for me to carry him