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Multigenerational Mom Muses on Twin Toddlers & Twenty-Something Daughters

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What I didn’t expect after my hysterectomy

I expected to feel less than whole. To mourn my uterus, to miss the procreant cradle where my babies rocked until I rolled them out and raised them up. To perhaps feel like I’m missing what makes me a woman. But that’s not what I felt.

I’ve felt missing completely. Lost in a head full of white static, my body lost in post-anesthetic cotton batting. Muffled thoughts floating in half-dreams and white-sheet other-worlds opened by robotic arms and pain-numbing canister snaps. So disconnected. So dejected. Missing parts and missing people.  Body blue and punctured, matching my mood. 

I also didn’t expect the exhaustion. Weights hooked and hanging at the end of my limbs, the start of my thoughts. Everything sluggish and sidelined. Everything empty. I shed a lot of tears. Felt sorry for myself. Felt forgotten and alone.

But that was far from the truth — was all the fallacy of post-surgical funk. Because I have had so many people rally around me and my family. So many people shower us with love. So many meals delivered, texts sent, pickups and drop offs completed, prayers spoken. I grow weepy (with gratitude this time) just thinking about it.

And today, the cobwebs and cotton batting are limned in a see-through-the-murky-to-better-days brightness. I feel like I’m closer to the other side now – the side where my family is, my friends are, where energy pours like sunshine and waterfalls. It’s shimmering there in the haze like the northern lights I missed the weekend of my surgery. The shine is returning. I’m nearly there. 

And it’s all thanks to a little help from my friends, my family, my people, my village.

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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
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Spotted

Like

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.

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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

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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.

 

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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.

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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?

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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. 

 

 

. 

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A Thousand Twinkling Sparks

I’ve always loved starlight.

The dusty sprinkle of the Milky Way,

the brittle glitter of constellations,

the renaissance glow of old and new,

of reds and golds and faintest blues.

 

And the flames of candles, too.

The shimmering flicker of a haloed wick,

the undulating liquid light that peaks 

and flattens, fizzes and flares, 

always moving, yet still so still. 

 

So, of course I love Christmas — 

the dotted-light stitch of houses

and trees. The starry-night feel 

of them, as if we’d dredged the 

heavens with a honey wand and

 

pulled its sweetness down to our

hearths and homes, our hearts and 

bones kindled with a thousand twinkling 

kindnesses, a thousand twinkling well 

wishes, a thousand sparks of love

of comfort.

of joy.

 

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