Your Explosive Child

reflections on thirty. reflections on my mother. reflections on reflections.

I did it

I made it through.

I sit in the yard I grew up in staring at the circle of blue encased in green.

I'm thirty. I'm thirty.

I sit in the woods that my mother walked when she was thirty. When she lied to the bank about what they were using their loan for. When she said, sure, I'll buy a nursery with you. She left the nursery a long time ago, but the woods are hers. They always have been. I grew up in them, small and angry. I watched my mother grow upin them, equally matching my stature and rage.

A copy of Your Explosive Child is still on a bookshelf somewhere in the house.

One explosion raising another.

I'm very close to my maternal grandmother, and my mother. Generational things sit in the forefront of my mind. Gifts, trauma, blessings, curses, things of that nature.

I've been thinking a lot about what we're given, about measuring out the ingredients we were handed and then looking at the beautiful life we created with them. Like one long episode of Chopped. My basket filled with bright and fresh vegetables, some strange canned indigestible things, and a curveball or two. And Ted Allen's only giving me 30 minutes. The fuck.

But I did it. You did it.

I think of my mother as she "piddles" around the garden tending to her joyous chaos and I think about what Ted Allen gave her and how she did the impossible.

Impossible things.

I can feel her looking at the back of me from the kitchen window and I wonder how many times she's done that and how many times she's flipped me the bird through that window and how many times she's cried at the back of my head overwhelmed with love and I don't want her to know I'm crying a little and I don't want her to know I'm writing but I don't want her to think I'm on my phone instead of reading the Mary Oliver poems that I took out here to read. I'll read the poems now. Knowing the universe, I'm sure I'll flip to one that fits right here and I'll share it with you when I do. Or if I don't, I won't and this will be the end.