Slam style, beat length

What's that you ask me?

What's with this empty face?

Empty not,
honey dear

empty's nowhere in this place

let me attempt to tell you
what's plain beyond the stare
how i walk and talk and daydream
on things you don't see there

see i

dream incantations
i
walk with gods and more
i
weep meditations
i
devour metaphors

i
stride in step with furies
i
float above the trees
i
look down on creation
i
come back into me

i rise with hopes astounding
bed down in reverie

the face may look empty,
but the mind will never be.

Comeuppance

I can tell when my father says
"now, Nikki,"
that i'm forever that
jean-jacketed
Aqua-Netted
tight-rolled preteen
knowing nothing whatever of the world.

I could start to get emotional about the tone of one simple pet name, or i could get real and realize that maybe, in this case, i really do know nothing whatever.

The deal is, i'm in the midst of a deal that could see me owning not one or two, but three rental units in the next couple months. I am scared shitless that i am going to screw it up, work the margins the wrong way, forget some important financial obligation that must be factored in, or otherwise fall right back into... where i am right now.

I want this comeuppance so badly -- have for years. At this moment the best way to ensure i'm not going to do any of the above-named things is to consult the wizards and wise-people in my life, and listen when they give their assessment. Even when the prideful preteen with the puffy bangs comes out in the conversations that are supposed to be so adult.

So that's one thing.

The other is, in spite of my desire to be so independent, i am freaked about making this decision on my own, as a single person. In this case, one of the best parts about being single appears to be the rub too: When things go right, pat your owndamnself on the back. When things go wrong, I have no one to blame but myself. So will i loathe myself if i make the wrong choice in this case?

Or is this question here to teach me that love and loathing should not be so conditional -- that we should not love someone or start hating them only based upon the choices they make?

So that's the other thing. I can consult the oracles in my life and ask them what they think, but in the end I am the one writing the checks and taking on the pile of stress, and perhaps stacks of cash too.

Hustle for Haiti

Her hands are moving so fast they're a blur for this Blackberry phone pic.

If i've asked myself in the past what hustle feels like, this is the answer. This is my friend Chelsea, putting up one of the posters she had commissioned in the past week. But the poster is only the mere tip of the iceberg.

I have to spend a moment giving mad props for the grassroots kick-assery that this woman just pulled off. I spent most of my Sunday helping her set up for "Helping Haiti," a music and auction event at the Mt. Tabor Theater, that Chelsea organized inside the tidy span of a week. Not only did she raise thousands for Haitians by tapping into her local resources, but she got innovative too. The event allowed you to choose between five different organizations to donate to when you walked in the door.

My humble contribution pales in comparison to the hours, the planning, the shoring up of every resource -- media, musical, organizational, financial -- that she put in to put on this event. But whether you have a few hours or a whole week to commit, it's the type of stuff we should all be doing, whenever we get the chance. Props!

We're all desperate to save our kids

The hours from the first to last kindergarten bell go by in mad fashion. I go tramping all over these six hours of parental freedom as if they were the only thing keeping me from the mad house, and the poor house. And they are, by most accounts. I must work and schlep and scrape -- such is the life of the single parent.

I keep this frenetic pace because feel i have to save my daughter from all the ills that could befall her -- the calamities of poverty and absent fathers, and all the peripheral, sometimes awful people that appear present because of them. I am desperate to save her from all of it. So i take on more than i could possibly accomplish in those six hours, or even double that, hoping overkill will quell the beasts.

This, at the expense, sometimes, of actually being with the little revolutionary.

But i suppose we're all desperate to save our kids from whatever ills befall them. It's just our nature as parents.

A single father i know is watching his son drown in the emotion of losing the step-family he'd come to love. So the father is desperately treading water, shirking his work duties, hoping to keep his kid above the surface.

A single mother i know is drowning in debt, missteps, and lack of support. She's so close to the eye of the black hole that i had to step in and help her in her fight. Her desperation to save her kid has rubbed off on me, apparently.

In the movie Extraordinary Measures, a father goes on a mad chase that sees him creating a company, selling it, spending less time with his kids because of it -- all in the hope that he'll find the life-saving treatment for his two ailing children. And he found it. I just saw the Portland-based film at an advanced screening two nights ago, and it has me thinking a lot about desperation, and what we'll do to save our kids.

Does it mean more than patting yourself on the back for working so hard during the six hours your kid's at kindergarten? Should it actually mean taking time away from said kid during what could be bonding time?

Like the movie pointed out in more extreme terms, sometimes the bigger picture has to win out -- whatever that is. In my case, the desperation to rise above poverty has to come before putting together puzzles with my kid after school. For that single father, it means the opposite -- that money has to play second fiddle to his kid's emotional health. For that other single mother, it means swallowing the pride and accepting help from a person you never would have imagined accepting it from. For the man in the movie, it meant only coming home on the weekends, working the week long to help find a medicine that could help his kids.

We are all desperate to save our kids -- though sometimes we have to make the decision we don't want to make in order to save them.



** Related work: Manifesto -- a piece about legacy
Pretty Pink Bows -- a piece about schlepping

Little Pill

I'm barely hanging on,
but
one little pill is keeping me on the boat.

It's been one of those days when it's all just too much -- the defiant child making one too many stabs at defiance, the various jobs spreading me thin all over the metro area, scraping together a dinner before the next school event this evening... i operate as if it was required that we attend this social gathering even after our long day; the kiddo's two-year old sister in tow, both of them poking and whining and bubbling into meltdown mode on the ten-minute drive. I have little good to say; the muttering mother uttering nothing motherly.

On these days i am the coffee cake
one dry hour away from
becoming a pile of crumbs.

When we get home there are more outbursts and eruptions and i blame myself for not keeping it all together. As i gulp down a handful of vitamins i wonder if i can survive this. Ha. On the radio this day are Gazans living under siege, Haitians reeling from another disaster, Sudanese maybe never going back home again -- and here i am, whining about bratty kids and too much work. Too much abundance. Ha.

The acceptance that my life is at least comparatively good is the first step toward giving the crumbs some form again. The second is this handful of vitamins. They signal my effort to honor myself.

One little pill, or two or three, swallowed with the intention of taking care of one's self. A puja to yourself is the tighter grip on the hull.

I'm barely hanging on,
but
one little pill is keeping me on the boat.

Mean Girls

Jesus, it starts already.

Your kid has barely broken in her first pair of kindergarten sneakers and already you're having to coach her about healthy friendships, respect, and the meaning of the word bully. Even if you don't exactly use the word bully.

When it comes to girls, bullies aren't just bullies. They're friends too.

In the case of my kindergartener, the bully is the best friend. She's the best friend who lavishes cheap dolls on my daughter, all wrapped up in holiday leftovers, then professes "i'm not your friend" the same afternoon. She's the one who my daughter loves to bring gifts for too -- and to let her borrow her things. The last time my kid borrowed that kid a pair of boots (why the hell they were in her backpack, i don't know...) it took four days of begging for my daughter to get them back. And when we did get them back they stunk like sockless feet and jumping in puddles.

This is a lot to take, this lesson about respect. It's tough to convince a child that the way someone treats your things is often the way they regard you too. Especially when your voice has that unconvincing twinge to it while you're giving out the lesson -- since you're the one who's allowed your ex to mangle your car on more than one occasion.

What i'm saying is, there's a lot of 'do as i say, not as i do' around here. And it enrages me to see my daughter allowing what i've allowed, on some smaller scale.

So maybe this is how the world really works -- you are expected to teach your children the lessons you didn't learn so well the first time. (Or even the second or fifth.) Believe me, i'm trying to make this one heard.

No end to love

Some people say it's saintly.

I say it's necessity.

It's only when i sit down and think about it do i know that there's more to the reunion between myself, my daughter, her younger sister, and the sister's mom. I could say that we mothers need each other, on account of a faraway father, and our mutual desire for a break. It's easy to trade off, letting each other get some time away from full-time parent.

But it's really more about love.

I finally asked myself how long was i to keep hating this person, who may have come into the picture before i was fully out of it, and hate her precious daughter, because i was jealous of something that happened long ago?

I came to this conclusion one day when the rage was bubbling up in me about the injustices and negligence doled out to these children by their father. I couldn't stand that these children, who so badly wanted a sibling, did not have a place to be together. And i simply couldn't take the thought that our children would suffer because of lack of love.

So i opted for love.

Within a matter of a few hours, really, i threw out the old disputes and hatreds and old, musty jealousy. Gone. These children deserved more love, not less.

Within a few days, this child who is not mine was playing happily on the floor of my daughter's room. She will probably not remember a time when she wasn't welcome to play there. It was not my choice to welcome her to this planet, but now that she's here, there can be no end to that love.