postmodernfamilyblog

Until Then

Picture this… Mothers and Daughters

Their procreative powers celebrated and valued

Along with

Their minds and voices, acknowledged and revered

— whether child-bearing, child-rearing, bread-winning, globe-setting or game-changing.

Women, not relegated to house and home, but women, free to regulate themselves.

Free to roam.

It could happen. It still could.

Picture so many women, Mothers and Daughters,

set to tell their stories. Mothers and Daughters

with stories like mine and hers and theirs.

Stories ready to be sung out, loud and proud.

Ready to upset the maelstrom of men and their spheres of control,

their spears of control,

manipulating stories.

controlling bodies,

codifying minds.

Women set to tell their stories unhobbled by laws, unhanged with stigma, unsacrificed on altars, no longer denigrated and diminished.

Picture Mothers and Daughters unlabeled.

Unlabeled as virgins, ladies, cock-teases, cougars, sluts, spinsters, trophy wives, whores, hags. Frigid or loose. Nasty or pure.

Unlabeled. Unhysterical, Unfat, Unskinny, Unugly, Unhot.

Unused and Unabused.

But no longer UnSung. Singing so many stories.

It could happen. It will.

That’s where me and my kind come in. The writers, the poets, the instigators.

The storytellers.

We play a fundamental role in the histories of Her Stories.

We keep the home fires burning,

Fostering and fueling far more than fires in hearths.

Feeding fires in hearts.

Encouraging stargazing, fire eating, and drops of Jupiter in our hair.

It’s in our dna, and has been, since the wheel first whetted the knife. Caves first oxidized hands.

And we’ll keep doing it until the reach of our arms and the span of our hips, and the stride of our steps no longer fits the limits of their boxes.

Until our potential is so great, vibrates so powerfully, wells and swells so phenomenally, that their spheres all burst and new worlds are all birthed, new galaxies unfold…

And we all find a place.

Our place –

– for ourselves and our daughters.

Until then.

The Physiological Effects of Football on a Coach’s Wife

Football gives me chills. And chest tightness. And tachycardia. And tremors. And hypotension. And breathlessness. And Fatigue. But it’s all good. I promise.

Let me explain…

Yesterday, just after 1:00 PM, I kissed my husband goodbye and watched him head off to the football war room, a scenario we’ve repeated every Sunday afternoon since early August. He strolled purposely down our sidewalk, his bag full of notes on this week’s opposing team’s tendencies slung over his shoulder.As I watched him leave, my chest tightened with pride. It’s Week Two of Georgia High School playoffs. The competition is getting fiercer, so Mike and his fellow defensive coaches burned the midnight oil preparing their game plan.

It’s a mysterious process to me, the deconstruction of an offense. In my fiercely romantic brain, I imagine it’s an exposition closely akin to the annotation and explication of metaphysical poetry. I picture the guys huddled around their Hudl screens, marking up schemes with dexterity and determination, scrutinizing pistol formations and pondering triple options with the same respect and gritty fortitude that I scrutinize syntax and ponder paradox, searching for the key to decipher the cryptic code and whittle it down into chewable chunks.

I’m sure it’s a formidable feat, arduous and time-consuming; always open to interpretation; and painfully exquisite– if that’s your thing. And it is absolutely, positively my guy’s thing. For the past decade, I’ve watched him light up like a Hurricane scoreboard when he talks shop with fellow coaches. Football powwows with people in the know is one of his most intense pleasures. And I love that he’s found his niche within this fine group of coaching fellows. Perhaps I’m biased, but I truly believe they may be the most amazingly gifted and gracious crew ever to be assembled in the history of high school football.

Watching them from the stands as they interact with their players on Friday nights, tremors of excitement run up and down my spine. It starts with pregame. I love seeing the boys clustered around their position coaches, going through their drills. The bursts of whistle and muscle; the blur of footballs and footwork; the thud of shoulder pads and practice punts. Pregame gives me shivers.

And then there is the moment at the beginning of every game, just prior to kick off, when the boys and their coaches march evenly out across half the field and kneel. One-hundred-twenty-plus boys of one-hundred-fifty-plus pounds – they all take a knee and give the Lord a moment of silence and respect.

It leaves me breathless.

Then the world speeds back up again. The crowds gather; the cheerleaders chant; the bands play; the lights hum; and the stadium pulses. But just before it all goes down, just before the band plays Amazing Grace and The Star-Spangled Banner, just before the team runs through the tunnel of swirling white smoke and takes the field, just before the scoreboard sounds off and the place kicker blasts off, Mike climbs the stadium steps on his way to the box. And he always stops off to deliver a kiss to me and our boys. Seeing him approach, his chocolate eyes smiling, his caramel skin glowing, his wide, warm shoulders swaying, my heart swells and my knees go weak. I am truly a blessed woman.

Yes, Friday nights give me goosebumps. Good old-fashioned, puckered-up chicken skin. And not because I’m lucky enough to get a pre-game kiss from a tall mug of coaching caramel macchiato. (Although that helps, too.) But because boy, can our boys play some ball. And man, can our men coach ‘em up. There is nothing like a good, crisp, spiral-sliced Friday night.

And now we’ve been blessed with a second week in our playoff run. And I’m praying for another three after this. Another three-and-a-half weeks of single parenthood and lonely bedtimes. The boys and I have this routine down pat. It’s old hat. And we’re in it for the long haul.

So here’s hoping and praying for another four weeks of Sunday War Rooms, Chili Night Wednesday Nights, Friday Night Lights and everything in between. I’m ready for the run. My heart can take it. My body is addicted to the thrilling, physiological effects of really good football. And it’s all good.

Our Postmodern Family

Our Real Modern Family

I’ve been thinking about starting a blog for a while now… I guess ever since we decided to bake up a couple of twins from scratch using borrowed eggs and my forty-seven- year-old oven. My daughter once called us the “Real Modern Family” – and you know, she’s right. I’m a Southern woman married to a half-Korean, half-Italian/Slovenian Yankee man twelve years my junior; I have two beautiful twenty-something daughters, an arthritic dappled dachshund and a morbidly obese cat. And now, after much thought and consideration — and then funding and injections, vaginal suppositories, and appointments — I have started motherhood all over again. This will be the story of us: our real modern family. Or maybe, more appropriately, our postmodern family. Postmodern, as in “radical reappraisal.” And our story is, indeed, a radical reappraisal of how to make and nurture a family.

Many things have changed since that summer almost three years ago when we began our in-vitro journey… I will do my best to record current happenings, as well as flashbacks to those glory days of post-modern fertilization, pregnancy pillows, and preeclampsia. I’m hoping our story will be an inspiration to those battling the frustrations of infertility, to those navigating the beautiful and rugged territory of twindom, and to those who decide to either start a family or do it all over again at a rather ripe age.

Even as I try to type this, I question why I’m doing it. I have nothing special to say. I’m nothing special. I nearly stop before I’ve begun, but then I think… I’m nothing special, true… but I do have something different to offer. I can’t imagine there are too many forty-nine year olds out there lactating. Not too many women out there with twenty-three years difference between their last baby girl and their most recent baby boys, not too many women who, as my father says, “ran the engine and the caboose when it comes to supplying grandchildren.” Not too many women out there who just suffered through a sixteen-month stint of extreme sleep deprivation. If nothing else, I can be a freak show for people to point at and ridicule. Still, I hope I can inspire a few to give postmodern family planning a go.

Feeling Salty?

There they stand, pretty maids all in a row.

Salt of the earth #tradwives, wrapped in aprons

and humility, baking sour dough rolls

and buns in ovens since two became one.

The glory of their lord shines all about,

pillar cocked and smoking, an inferno —

a raging reminder of what’s been vowed:

be fruitful and multiply, trust and oh-

babes, you’ve let the laundry pile up and re-

sentment rush in, gathering here, drifting

there, coating your once-fertile crescents in

barren grains of sand. Your mindsets must shift,

be pliant, dutiful, beautiful, not

lost shakers of salt, defying your lot.

…I mean how much good could should would truly come from plumbing your depths beyond the breadth of your womb your tomb your lead balloon waking shaking breaking (no mistaking it) free willy-nilly I mean really from your perimeter placement on the parched and patterned pages of that aged staged staid and time to be waylaid patriarchy?

by Heather Peters Candela

Photo by Lorena Martu00ednez on Pexels.com

April 27, 2024 0

Spotted

a calico kitten or a Dalmatian pup?

An appaloosa’s flanks or a speckled green toad?

Ladybug shells or butterfly wings?

A giant giraffe neck, a ginger’s freckled chest?

Cheetahs? Leopards?

A lantern fly nymph?

Or more like

Blueberry muffins

Or chocolate chip scones?

Or more like red-capped, warted

mushrooms? Poison hemlock stems?

Or spotted like

Cruella Deville’s floor-length fur coat?

Daisy Buchanan’s skittering pearls?

Desdemona’s strawberry handkerchief?

The sleep-haunted hands of Lady Macbeth?

Gertrude’s black and grained soul?

Or spotted like

The hiccupping sun’s surface,

Brewing disruption in planet-sized

Storms of magnetic mayhem…

Pretty much like this thing

Spotted

There on the monitor,

Blooming like Rorschach’s inkblot

Amidst the hollowed-out, round, sound-

Waves spinning didgeridoo vowels amidst

Rumbling, bubbling bowel sounds.

A shifting, sizable storm cloud.

A pale and pockmarked moon.

A shadowy, seething portent.

Marring the vault of a once

procreant cradle.

A dappled dollop of disorder.

Spotted.

Get it out, out.

April 24, 2024 0

Spring Blankets

Just yesterday morning, rain clouds filled the sky in gray velvet folds draped heavy over the newly hatched woods, leaves shivering, sagging from the weight, the wait. The dogwood blossoms — bright as match flares – trembled, knowing soon they’d be doused, tender petals downed and drowned. The cardinal couple, wings flame-stitching the shadows as they lit from sod bank to branch and back again, banked on a breakfast cut short and shared their worm like Lady-and-the-Tramp pasta boiled well past its prime. While the cat, shoulders knuckled, crept toward them, one ear cocked to her prize, the other to the threatening cloudburst, the roll of thunder overhead. Then the clouds split wide –not with rain, but golden sun – showering treetops

in cream soda light,

leaves glowing lemon and lime,

blossoms blinding white

Today the same skies are different still, pale pink haze over lavender-blue, lying whisper-soft as an infant’s shawl above the feathered limbs of fizzy trees. The cat naps on her pillow. The dogwood blossoms tremble still, at the brevity of it all, the beauty of it all, as does the cardinal couple singing cheer, cheer, cheer through the

baby soft hiccup

of this morning’s scene, dogwood

blossoms losing steam

April 5, 2024 0

Easter Boys

Last night, I watched a dozen preteen

boys hunt Easter eggs in the pixelated

gloaming.

Too big for their baskets, they chose bags

for their haul, grocer’s plastic snapping in

the wind

as they raced. Each new prize plucked from

its hiding spot settled snug in their sacks,

until, from

the ends of their peach-fuzzed arms hung

lanterns of multi-globed splendor, synapsed

and pulsing

with LED portent. Soon peach-fuzzed forearms

turn to timber-lined jaws and egg-hunting spring

turns to

university fall. And so on and so on until one day

quite soon, these too-big for-their-baskets egg-

hunters

become fathers with sons who choose the pull of

plastic beneath their fingers to the heft of handles

in their palms.

March 31, 2024 0

sssssslay me

expose the wonder. peel my layers back

with persistence and your forked, silver tongue

‘til light unzips my folds and I lose track

and all control; ‘til hoofbeats pound, unstrung

notes sound, in the bowl of my core, the bell

of my temple vibrating, keenly and round.

peel me with your teeth, pomegranate knelled

and bursting, unleashing all the profound,

forbidden mysteries of paradise

throb after throb unspooling like ticker tape,

grazed nerves flushed with brimstone and god light,

making my body, consciousness, soul ache

for more dances with death, more cessation

of breath, more kingdom-come-hellfire-salvation.

March 23, 2024 0

Paper Doll

She walks

in beauty like a

Joan Crawford/geisha

girl, like a paper doll, silken

kimono cinched tight at the

waist, soft sleeves ballooning

beneath shoulder pads, fabric

flaked with the fragments

of your love, with the

fragments

of your

whims and shifting moods.

Blue like the jet stream from

that trip in September to Paris,

the one where she spilled coffee

(your coffee) at that café and it got

on your newspaper, and it got on

your nerves. She wears that

memory, you know,

deep inside.

She wears it

like the azaleas

blooming at those houses

you toured in Savannah last spring,

their pearlized pinkness nearly matching

the sunset and her lips, before the blood and bruising.

Before something, a misstep — a missed step on the historic

steps — broke a heel on the Prada pumps you bought her just

three weeks before, so you broke something too. Some

thing you regret, of course. Something that turned

all those little pink houses ghostly gray, the

pinch of your fist erasing her smile, the

soft light in her eyes. The wind will

rise, she’s learned, and she can

only try to curl inward for

shelter, to erase her

self even more.

Her center

is cinched

tight, but

her fold-

over

tabs

flap loose as,

broken-cheeked, with blackened-brow,

she walks in beauty, diminished by night.

March 2, 2024 0

How Can We Fix This?

A child was lost.

A child lost.

The world beat him

Battered him, bruised him to breaking,

And – go figure —

He broke.

His spokes gave out.

His wheels flew off.

His handlebars torqued.

And he tumbled.

He’d been tumbling awhile.

But this time,

He tumbled so far

He could not,

Would not –

Refused –

To get back up.

On the front end of a warm Tuesday

At the ass end of a cold month,

Sick to death with hurt,

He took charge.

With a discharge that fixed

And dilated

His pain

In a huge, gaping hole.

That opened to a ravine

That swallowed a family

And shook a school

And rattled a community.

His mother unhinged

His father undone

His siblings unstrung

His promise unsung

His lyrical, beautiful,

Guitar-humming

Soul-strumming

Sweet promise,

That could make this place beautiful

– so, so beautiful –

Left unsung.

How can we fix this?

Not this, that’s impossible —

Fixed forever in a curled dark hole

Deep in his family’s ribs

Howling unchecked —

But this?

This brokenness

This curled dark hole

Deep in society’s rib

Howling unchecked

… and ignored.

How?

February 28, 2024 0

Pivot like Rilke, Pause like Oliver

You must change your life, Rilke said.

There is no place that does not see you.

So, burst like a star from all the borders

of yourself.

And to do that, you must:

Pause

and attend to

the riotous performances

of those that

recognize life

and its beauty in the

here and now,

in the being,

said Oliver.

And to do that, you must:

Be alive in the fresh morning.

Be the dark center where procreation flares.

So, pivot like Rilke. Pause like Oliver.

Be permissive.

Like a poet.

Like roses,

fully blown,

drinking the air of the silver morning

with their petal-soft mouths,

tasting and celebrating all that there is,

in moment after moment of perfumed possibility.

Pay attention.

Do that.

January 27, 2024 0

The Butterfly Effect

The earth hath bubbles, as the water has and these are of them. Whither have they vanished? ~~ William Shakespeare

When I read this week about six people from Missouri, four adults and two children –

read about the metaphysical-and-quantum-physics-spouting cult leader spinning chaos

from a prison cell, proclaiming his targeted victims “carbonated beings,” I couldn’t help

but think of Banquo’s quote from Macbeth. Because those six people, like ginger ale fizz

and the three weird sisters, all vanished into thin air.

Kind of like me at sixteen – a victim of a cult, but a victim in reverse. My father, a chaos

physicist, teaching the science of surprise, the science of the nonlinear and unpredictable,

while mourning the loss of a father, found evangelical fundamentalism, fusing love of

subatomic principles with an unbending rendering of scripture thanks to a ramrod patriarchal penis-head

stirring butterfly wings with bible verses, and unspooling

a teenaged typhoon in Tennessee. All because I refused to walk as a sheep. Me, who used to

trail after my father like the dust trail on a comet, shimmering in his presence, preening as he

presented to my fifth-grade class all the mysteries of our brave overhanging firmament, fretted with

golden fire and planetary motion, his faith never faltering, even as his faith failed me. I learned the

science of surprise, how lines of scripture can become prison bars

destroying free will and families alike. The mother of one of the missing mothers in Missouri, when

interviewed, says she’s “holding on by her faith” to the hope that her daughter and grandchild will be

found. Ironically, that’s exactly how her daughter vanished – by holding on by her faith. As did my

father’s daughter — his faith a soothing balm for the ache of a father’s loss in his heart, which then created the ache of a father’s loss in my own.

The flutter of faith’s metaphysical wing – so fair and foul a thing I have not seen.

January 20, 2024 0

Multigenerational Mom Muses on Twin Toddlers & Twenty-Something Daughters