How I Am Old

28 years ago today, I was cut out of my mother’s stomach. I was headed out the vagina feet first, which isn’t usually recommended.  Legend has it that my father turned white as a ghost. My mother said that after she knew I was okay, she thought that she might die, but that it would be okay because I was already born. 



Mother, Sister, Me. All of us born.



I heard of a pregnant lady who’s getting a planned c-section this Thursday, on Halloween. A Halloween Caesarean. I feel like if it were my caesarean, I’d pick another day.

 

Today, I am overwhelmed with Facebook, text, and other digital birthday love. Even Google seems to know that it’s my birthday. There are colourful cupcakes and cakes on the homepage. Thank you Google, but thank you more to all the other real people I’ve met in real life and who remembered me.

On the bus this morning, I decided I would make a clichéd list about things that make me old.

1.  A small bunion is growing on the inside of my left foot. Despite years of diligently spreading my toes barefoot or wearing devastatingly practical shoes. Also, I think spider veins on my legs are in my near future. So be it. My short shorts aren’t going anywhere.

 



Long Live the Kino Shorts

 



2. I like to go to bed at 9 P.M. Even better is to go to bed at 8 P.M. and read library books until I fall asleep. Conversations after 9 P.M. exhaust me. Parties are the worst. No part of my body can make peace with why I am upright, awake and speaking.  My bedtime is geriatric.

3. I hate the people on the bus who blast horrible music through their headphones with the arrogant assumption that I might like to hear their lyrics word for word. One afternoon I asked some dude on the 80 if he might like to mute the video game music that was massacring my ears.  He looked at me with enormous disdain and called me a stupid fucking c-word. So now, on the bus, I say nothing. I sit, sighing, glaring and shaking my head like a seething eighty-year-old woman.

And that’s it. Otherwise, I am not very old. I look back on words and photographs from every year of my life, and even from last week, and I think, what a baby, you’re so young. As though the person looking back is so wise and aged. A week later, a year later it will be the same thing. Me looking at me, so young. 

 



Me, taking action, getting action, 27 years old.





Me nasal-flossing in Miami, 26 years old.



Me and my sister at the Halifax Harbour. 26 years old. Very sophisticated.



Me, 16, reading Amelia Bedelia at summer camp.


Me, Darby and Joanne, singing Kirtan, the first year I started Mysore, 22 years old.



    

Rocking the houla hoop, and tie-dye, on Mary Street in Perth, Ontario, 7 years old.

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What the fuck should I do with my life? (Part One)

27 years + 1 human gestational period plus a couple of days ago, I was born. An enormous baby. 10 pounds and a couple of ounces. They cut me out of my tiny mother's tiny tummy. My feet were pointed towards her vagina. It's not the normal way people are supposed to be born. For years, I was terrified of going upside down.

Now I call out to my mother during sex.

My mother seems to get tinier every time I see her. She is 5 ft 3 and seems half the size of me. I am consistently baffled that I ever made it out of her vagina. Then I remember that I didn’t make it out. She got cut open. I tower over her, and feel twice as wide as she is, despite everyone's assurance that I am not an enormous person. Has my mother always been so tiny? Is she shrinking?

The children I work with, they call out for their mothers when they're sad or when they're scared. Mommy, Mommy, Mommy. "I need Mommy," one of them says.

One day, a new child arrived. He called out for both of his parents at once. "Mommy-Daddy-Mommy-Daddy." It was all one word. All day, he called out one big long never-ending word." All the other kids started to call for both of their parents at a time too.

"Mommy-Daddy-Mommy-Daddy..."

During sex, I started saying it too.

"Mommy-Daddy-Mommy-Daddy."

Probably the Boatman is a saint.

The first time I mentioned my mother during sex, he was licking my vagina. Usually this feels very good. The Boatman adores licking pussy. He learned how from an early girlfriend who found out she was a lesbian. I think that learning from a lesbian is a good strategy. Also, the Boatman played the saxophone during middle school.
Anyways, he was down there, and it felt pretty good, but I could feel the tears coming. Tears happened all the time. This time was different though, because the tears came with an embarrassing thought.

I miss my Mom.

The Boatman says that during sex I can yell and scream and cry and say whatever I want.

Once I asked my mother if she'd ever had an orgasm. I shouldn't have asked her, but I was having trouble in that regard, and I was curious. Was it genetic? Had she experienced an Orgasm?

"Oh yah," she replied. "But it wasn't very good."

I think that's a really clear answer.

Every time I visit my mother, my sex life is destroyed for weeks afterwards.

Last spring I went to Ontario for five or six days. The Boatman and I loved and missed each other. All the stories in our heads made our love feel so beautiful and perfect. When the visit was over, the Boatman picked me up at the Halifax airport. He picked me up at the airport at 11 o’clock at night. We were back in the freshness and the air and the inspiration. Back in the love.

The first night we were too tired for sex. That was one of our excuses. The other excuse was that I could still feel my mother there with me. My tiny cut open mother.

On the next night, I had trouble concentrating. I couldn’t feel anything, as though my vagina was turned off, or dead. “Relax,” I said to myself. “Just relax. See what happens.”

The Boatman started fucking me a little harder. He was on top.

“Mommy, Mommy,” I called out a couple times. He kept fucking.

“She hates me,” I said suddenly. My words were loud and clear and decisive.

The Boatman stopped and looked at me. “You okay, babe?”

“Yes.” He kept going.

“I hate her,” I said a little later. 

The next day we fucked on the couch. Same thing with not being able to feel anything or concentrate. We tried a couple different positions. The Boatman came and afterwards I put my crotch on his thigh and humped him.

“She’s dead,” I said, a couple minutes into it. We both laughed. There was nothing left to worry about.

We kept fucking almost every day.  I started feeling my vagina again. It started to feel different. My whole vagina started changing, expanding. Then one evening, I was humping the Boatman's leg and Mommy came back.

“Mommy, Mommy, Mommy,” I called out. I paused and looked right at the Boatman who had his arms wrapped around me.

“She's orange,” I said.

The Boatman laughed.

I am lucky he likes to have sex with me even though I say weird things.

I say some things during sex, and some things during sleep.

A couple weeks ago, the Boatman lay next to me in bed. I had already been sleeping for over an hour. I rolled over, my eyes closed.

“Mommy-daddy-mommy-daddy,” I murmured. “It is hard for Mommy to be born. Very hard.”

The Boatman laughed and spooned me.

Now my mother and I are visiting again and nobody has had sex for a very long time.

It is too hard.

Very hard.

The End.

There was a picture of my tiny mother, and tiny sister, and me.

Nobody was orange, or dead. But I decided to take it out.

This post was inspired by/adapted from a section in Volume Two of The Little Savage and the Hermit. Volume One used to be online but then I took it down. The Hermit used to be alive, but now he's dead.

Pondicherry, January, 2016

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Menstrual Blood, Peanut Butter

Every time your vagina bleeds, it means that you won’t become a mother.  My mother hated getting her period.   I remember the sobbing, the wailing, and the devastated voice.  “I’m getting my period,” she'd call out through tears. 

At least once, I saw a toilet full of blood.

It looked a little bit like this.

What the Blood Looked Like

I was around four years old when I saw the toilet full of blood for the first time. The people who wrote the Vagina Monologues complained that they couldn’t find any positive images related to menstruation.  How is this possible?  Look at the beautiful blood in this toilet.  It is hardly original.

Usually in life, your dreams don’t come true.  When I was a little girl, I dreamed of becoming an excellent brain surgeon, or president of the United States, or a nun.  None of these things have happened.   Maybe it is not too late, but probably it is.  That’s okay.  Other dreams have come true. 

Or at least one did.

A couple of months ago, I had the dream of pouring all of the internal lining of my uterus and whatever else comes out of my vagina into a jar throughout an entire menstrual cycle.  Then I would have all of the blood in one place.  I could look at it, keep it in my fridge, maybe water the plants with it, or use it for arts and crafts. 

Friends, it wasn’t easy, but I persevered.  Everywhere I went, I toted along my peanut butter jar.  If you aspire to do this yourself, I recommend opening the jar before you pull out the diva cup.  Opening the jar with a full diva cup can be a little precarious.  Good thing I have such excellent dexterity. Be sure to firmly secure the jar’s lid in place.  One evening, I took the jar out of the fridge where I kept it at night and showed it to the Boatman.  “Look at all my blood so far,”I said, holding out my right hand.

He was rightly mesmerized. 

Then he said, “Babe. Is that blood on your hand?”

Oops.

After five to seven days, the blood stopped flowing and the jar was as full as it ever would be.  For one and a half weeks, it sat on this refrigerator shelf next to the jam and the peanut butter and the ketchup and the vegannaise.   Beside the ketchup, there are jars of salsa and pickled turnips. Somewhere around there, you will also see a banana.  One and a half bananas.



My jar of blood, amongst other jars of other things

I hate veganaise and regular mayonnaise.  I also hate cleaning my fridge.       

Now it is Mother’s Day and blood is flowing from my vagina once again.  The peanut butter menstrual blood jar has long ago been carried away by a recycling truck. 

These photos are the only proof it ever existed. Behold the red, and see how it makes you feel.   
 

Thank you to the Boatman for supporting me in my dreams and taking such revolutionary pictures. 

Thank you to my mother for supporting me in my dreams and giving up menstruation at least nine months in my honour.

Happy Mother’s Day to my mother and everyone’s.

The End.



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Family Visits and Narcissistic Personality Disorder

Family visits destroy my creativity, and exacerbate my Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

Here are some Narcissistic photos of me, my sister and my mother.  The Boatman and the Big Black Dog also make appearances.  How could I leave them out?  Especially the Big Black Dog.  He is an incredibly talented narcissist. 



Me and my narcissistic dog.



Me, Sister, Mother

Same as above. Sister and Mother have more creative faces than I do. Recall that they destroyed my creativity during their visit. I forgive them.



At the Beach. Sister displays impressive pipes. The day before this photo was taken, she attended my Core Strength Yoga Class. The core strength radiated to her biceps. I must be an extremely effective yoga teacher.



Take Two, At the Beach. Sister throws her head back and the result is quite flattering.
 

Sister and Boatman were the first ones in the water. They celebrate their victories with Humility and Gratitude.


Mother and I did not win. We are baffled with Defeat.

The Icy Water's Aftermath. 

 Mother. Quite good-looking.

 Boatman plays the Cozy Hero.

Sister and I pose gracefully by a boat.

Sister graces the grocery store parking lot with her Salmon on Salmon attire.  Note the salmon knapsack as well.  And the toe point.

(Doesn't this remind you of the Boatman's Friend "Salmon Pants."  His name used to be Radislov, and he always wore salmon pants.  Then he went to an art show where the walls were  salmon and alas, his legs disappeared.  Learn all about  Mr. Salmon Pants and more at the Boatman's website www.verysatisfied.com.)

Now, back to being narcissistic.

 

 

 

Me and Big Black Dog, following a Mysterious Space. Like me, the Big Black Dog misses mother and sister now that they are gone.  Unlike me, this morning the Big Black Dog had hemorrhoids and diarrhea.  Both of those words are very difficult to spell.  They contain more r's than you might think.

Curious, isn't it?

I think this is the end of my prolific display of narcissism.

I hope that my creativity returns soon.

The End.

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Me and Big Black Dog, following a Mysterious Space.

Like me, the Big Black Dog misses mother and sister now that they are gone.  Unlike me, this morning the Big Black Dog had hemorrhoids and diarrhea.  Both of those words are very difficult to spell.  They contain more r's than you might think.