Like a Burry-Seed Rubbing your Armpit

A poem can do that, you know?

My parents split two years ago after 38 years together. I am one of 5 of their children. All now partnered-adults between 25-39, all currently child free. We have an interesting dynamic to say the least.

So since the break up my siblings and I are on two group chats. One with mom and one with dad.

There has been some awkwardness and discomfort moving into new territory as a group without a real form. Trying to figure out how to communicate within this new very leaderless structure.

I'm the oldest daughter so socially it's my role to kinkeep but I have pretty well refused it. I’m not interested in playing these roles out any more. I’m not actually sure I've out right said this to them all. It’s just I don't really view my family as my family in the say way, the structure is entirely new. I’m interested in exploring beyond what we’ve known before. We are a collection of adults, bonded by blood who enjoy getting together for holidays. Codependency, addiction, recovery, and mental disorder at varying levels of severity weave around our family’s (immediate and extended) collective consciousness, into the creeks and cracks of our traumatized past’s regularly triggered presents. We are all getting acquainted with new ways of interacting within each dimension.

It's been interesting to observe the progression of this later life divorce especially without the presence of any grandchildren. 5 adult children, their partners, and no grandkids?! I wonder what the statistical probably of that is? Truly it's something I'd love to find out.

Grandchildren seem to become quite a balm for parents and their adult children. They take the focus and attention off the relationship, potentially making situations easier, and I suppose also harder in other ways. Regardless, much less intimate feeling. There is so much less time to say anything when kids are around. Without the presence of children there is nothing but time, space, and silence.

And so our parents both send us random this and that. Little texts to say I love yous. Pictures of a beautiful rainbow (both of which have done this on separate occasions). Sayings that remind them of us. Reminders to rsvp to a thing.

My dad is moving again and has been cleaning out his place. He sent us a picture of me and my siblings much younger, like 20 years ago younger. These are the sort of things he sends. Generally, easy consumption sort of stuff.

Then last Sunday morning he sent us this Mary Oliver poem. This was outside the realm of things he would typically send us. It’s more deep. It felt a little off script for him in ways that I can't quite put my finger on. There is a part of me that loves this and there is a part of me that doesn’t. I both do and don't know why.

So I had been thinking so much about this poem since he sent it and was annoyed that it got me the way it did. Good poems do that though. They get you. They make you come back and revisit them. Over and over. “How did she say that?”, “what were the exact words of that line?”, “I need to check that poem one more time”,  “How did that last line go?”.

It’s like when you’re working in the garden and a burry-seed gets stuck somehow on the interior armpit seam of your shirt, right next to another of its kind just a little farther down and in, and when you realize you have something rubbing the tender skin of your armpit, you reach in and grab who you think is the culprit and you keep working, and then a while later you realize; sure enough, there was yet another seed in nearly the same spot but just a little farther down and in. And so you reach in and grab it and know for sure you got them all this time so your armpit can finally relax however you do now have two tender red spots that were rubbed little too long by those seeds and it's going to take some time for the disruption to settle.

So yeah. This poem was like those burry seeds on the armpit of my shirt. And it annoyed the ever lovin’ shite out of me until I got the burrs off and my shirt felt okay again on the tender skin of my pit. It was only then the medicine could come through.

Anyway, this is the text response I sent to the chat:

I have been thinking so much about this poem since you sent it. I didn't like it at first because from my perspective the sea isn't working. So I was grumpy at the notion of the sea being too busy working to have a conversation with Mary. Because to me, the sea always has time. Then just now I was sitting here, it popped into my field. When Mary hears the sea tell her "excuse me, I have work to do.”, what I now understand to be the sea's perspective is "stop thinking and start living" or "stop bemoaning and start being" because the sea's whole life is their work. Their work is their whole life. Their being is their work. Their work is their being. So when Mary is asking "what should I" the sea is saying, just be you and the work will follow. Happy Moonday!

Made wormwood tincture this morning (yesterday) under the sunrise and I felt like the sea at work.