This morning, like every morning since she could talk, I ask my daughter what she wants for breakfast and she says pancakes. And then as I am in the middle of making her pancakes, one eye on the clock, one eye on the stove, she wails that she wants oatmeal. Oatmeal! Oatmeal! I want OATMEAL Mama! Unable to speak any sense into her, I begin making her oatmeal.
We take her to school and she unbuttons her dress and refuses to put it back on again.
Crying for a moment that she doesn’t want to go. But then, letting go of my hand and walking in by herself, not even a look back. And I can’t help but think of Eurydice. I can’t help but think of the children who had to get on trains, and the children who are crossing borders, and the children whose parents will not come back. How can I not? A bomb making a crater in the Middle East.
None of us have bathed in days.
And maybe because it is September again, and maybe because there is a sudden dip in the temperature, and the day smells like rain, the wind whipping the sand into art along the boardwalk, I tell my husband.
I’m thinking of getting another tattoo.
Which is something I have been saying since David Bowie died.
For years I had wanted a buffalo etched on the inside of my forearm.
And when the cat died in February, I wanted to get a B tattooed on the inside of my right wrist. That every so often I think of the lonely barista in Joshua Tree, and the beautiful cat he had tattooed on his arm. And how I wanted to touch it, kernels of popcorn also raining down around it, her name was Spooky. He had said. And it was the first time we thought about how the desert we loved could drive one crazy, all that silence.
When I left my daughter for the first time I felt like I had dropped acid, taking the wrong freeway, the one filled with trucks out into that desert, and I couldn’t quite get my footing. The only one staying in the motel on the cul-de-sac. The night so quiet, and then the night filling with shouting, gun shots echoing all through the dirt and the sand, the sound of running. And they could be anywhere, behind the motel, or miles away. The waters bubbling up from the ground meant for healing. The next morning eating hard boiled eggs for breakfast, and raspberries, and seeded toast. Driving out to the farthest town for a pizza for dinner. Shocked to find myself still myself without her. Buying a quilt for my husband, and my daughter a pair of moccasins. I couldn’t stay still, I couldn’t just relax. Driving home in a tropical hurricane. That what I loved most about people who did not live in a city, was the way the weather meant something. What it might bring.
I had a dream once that before I knew what was happening I had a huge harp with flowers tattooed across and down my chest and trailing along my left arm, that before I could say wait what are you doing!? I had Please Say Amen For Me written across my shoulder blades in an old scroll font.
All day long I think about movies, about the ones I want to return to. A young drummer whose hearing goes, a movie that when my producing partner saw it said he bawled, and for some reason I thought I would be spared. But then, fetal position, not knowing how to breathe. And my husband said it reminds me of something of yours.
All day long I think about how I want to make a movie about the smell of water on concrete.
The images that I love - the way the ink and blood smear together, the tenderness with which a body part has to be held in a hand. The way a phone cord might curl around someone’s naked body, tanned and tattooed in the kitchen.
A mother asks me have you found the time to return to a steady creative practice yet?
And I poured myself out. My favorite topic. I type. Motherhood and process.
The kitten seeming to be endlessly teething.
Finding a note to myself on writing a movie that says the question continues to be will I throw this child out the window or?
Have you read The Smell of Rain on Dust?