{By Brittany Gibbons, The Barefoot Foodie}

Have you ever been driving somewhere, and, before you know it, you’re there and you have no idea how you got there?

I haven’t been present for a while.

My body was here, and every so often, familiar words would escape from my mouth, but for months, my mind was somewhere else, and my heart was off laying in a mud puddle somewhere while someone poked at it with sticks.

I’m a cutter.

Not that kind.

With my brand of cutting, there is no visible blood. All the scars are internal.

I was never going to say anything. I was just going to cut. Bleed. Heal.

But, I wasn’t really healing. I wasn’t clotting.

I was gushing. Heavily. And, it was blocking me.

Everything just squatting on my frontal lobe. Making my words not work.

(I have no idea what your frontal lobe does. I’m not a professional doctor.)

{by Rhonda Stansberry}

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Rhonda Stansberry is a photographer with a passion for history and architecture.
See more of her photography on her website, Stansberry Photography, and on Flickr.

:::

Featured by Editorial Director, Jennifer Doyle | @playgroupie

{by Craig Lesley, Bad Chemicals}

I’m zoned out most of the time. The world rifles by and I shuffle and daydream and stare at my shoes and don’t notice much of anything as weeks speed past.

But every so often I catch a sliver, the words “Forgive Me” spray painted on an overpass, the color of my eyes reflected in a shop window, my wife Sally making peanut butter cookies with our kids in the kitchen.

A few nights ago, rooting around for something to read on my night stand, I unearthed a picture, under a pile of magazines and books, taken last autumn at the neonatal intensive care unit. The whole family is in the photograph—Sally, our four-year-old, our two-week-old, and me. I’m holding the infant, who’s wrinkled and weighs barely three pounds. It looks like we’re all smiling, even the baby somehow.

The picture sent my head back, to those grey days, to the fluorescent lights in the sterile hospital, to that tiny boy with the tubes and the wires and the sensors.

That was a tough time. Sally had lost all that blood and our baby was teetering and the leaves were falling and every day I had to walk past the nursery with the plump babies and their proud relatives staring through the glass. Most days, I wanted to growl at those happy gawkers at the nursery window. I wanted to punch their grinning mouths.

But looking at that picture the other night, I realized the anger and worry had dripped away and what remained of those grey days was longing. I visited the newborn every afternoon in the hospital, and I told him about his brother and the pets at home as he laid in the incubator. I mentioned that the nice lady who kept stopping by and touching his feet was his mother. “You’ll like her,” I assured him. “She’s the one who knows what’s going on.”

I found myself missing those quiet afternoons together and the mystery of that wrinkled baby who I needed so desperately to grow big like the newborns in the nursery.

I drove the four-year-old to preschool that fall, and we discussed big trucks and soccer and hard rock as we cruised in the station wagon.

“Dad, do monster trucks like Metallica?” he asked one cold morning.

“Son,” I explained. “Monster trucks adore Metallica.”

I found myself missing those talks, too, as I gazed at that picture.

Yesterday, almost 10 months after the baby crashed into the world 10 weeks early, he crawled for the first time, grunting and stretching out and inching across the playroom to gum a toy. I called Sally in, and as she watched him crawl, she cheered.

Then she looked at me. “And so it begins,” she muttered, almost ominously.

Monday, the four-year-old, who is now the five-year-old, started kindergarten. He lugged his oversized Superman backpack down the stairs and all the way to his class without any help. “I’ve got it, Dad,” he told me.

Tuesday, in the school parking lot, he asked, “Dad, can I not hold your hand? I’ll be very careful.”

Today, he walked to class by himself. I stood at the school entrance as he rolled his backpack down the hallway, shorter and thinner than the other children bobbing along. A few steps in, the boy turned around and waved. Then he continued straight and confidently away.

I wish I could do that. I wish I could just walk away like my kindergartener did. But that’s not me. That’s not how I’m put together.

These boys are growing up, and they need to. They need to crawl. They need to go to school. They need to travel to sunny cities. They need to fall hard for pretty girls.

And I need to let them walk down those hallways and drive away in those cars, but I know I can’t completely. Some part of me will linger there, puttering along in the station wagon with the bad heavy metal cranked up, watching the five-year-old weave his way to class, rocking the infant in the hospital on those grey days last fall.

And that part of me will know that sadness is also a gift.

{by Nish, The Outdoor Wife}

All I have is the unsung in me.
The unwritten, empty pages blank,
Words piled up thick behind the whites of eyes
and the skin of my teeth.
The tiny voice speaks bold and
claws out from fingernails,
Unspoken.

I have a heart of superglued glass.
I have the ink on skin
that bleeds out onto paper.

All I have is hellfire passion
burning slow and set aflame by only
one man’s touch. His.
He unearths me with gentle hands to
untamed skin and I am left
undone.

(by Talon)

photo credit

Never pick the berries the birds don’t touch
you told me long ago
and I remembered your words
when I saw the red berries
glistening in the snow
and I didn’t touch them
because the birds ignored them
leaving the fruit to the muse of winter

Never make a wish on a waning gibbous
you told me long ago
for you said the wish became magic
under a waxing crescent
the new would herald beginnings
with endings tucked inside
and when I saw the moon near full
I stilled my secret

{by Alison from aPearantly sew}

Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights,
before the dark hour of reason grows. ~John Betjeman, Summoned by Bells

• • •

“Protective” by Alison from aPearantly sew | shop aPearantly sew | @AliLittle28
shared via Instagram

{by Jonniker}

She picked up the glass, twirling the crystal stem in her fingers, holding the paper-thin bowl up to the light. They were the perfect glasses–Baccarat, not Waterford, as everyone knew Waterford was too fussy. All those facets, she thought bitterly. I don’t want to drink out of the Chrysler building.

She remembered the day they picked them out–well, the day she did, anyway, whirling around Neiman’s with the glowing red gun. He resisted initially, insisting that they were too expensive.

“Babe, I don’t want my grandmother forking over $300 for a single water glass,” he said. “Can’t we get these instead?”

He’d pointed to a display of Lenox glasses. Goddamn LENOX. She rolled her eyes at the memory. As if I’d be caught dead entertaining with a $36 glass. She won him over by insisting that the glasses were an investment.

“An investment in a lifetime of memories,” she cooed.

Stupid. I’m so stupid.

She turned the Baccarat upside down again, watching the light bounce off the rounded stem. She put it back on the table and twisted her hands for a moment before letting them fall into her lap. They rustled in the folds of her tulle slip, and she realized with horror that she was still wearing her wedding dress.

Her hands smoothed the fabric as she glanced down at herself admiringly.

{by Erika Wagner-Martin}

For so, so long it felt like we would never get here.

We smiled show smiles through home visit after home visit by social worker after social worker.
We steeled ourselves as we bundled them up for trips to the visitation center far too far away.
We held our breath, our hearts the frontline cavalry from the back row of the courtroom
anytime we attended a hearing.

I have knocked on wood — and by wood, I mean anything comprised of matter — thousands of times,
gasping for air as I’ve constricted and believed and constricted and believed our dream
of being a forever family with these precious, precious girls.

The beginning of this process is full of fear for people like me.
You’ll never get a newborn, they tell you. You want two together?
They will be damaged and you will spend a lifetime trying to save them
and love alone cannot save anyone, they say.

{By Schmutzie of Schmutzie.com}

My past year was filled with some heavy stuff. I went through depression, which is not abnormal for me in the least. If you look back at the prevalence of depression throughout my life since I was about three years old, you would think it was one of my most favourite things ever. It’s not, but there’s been lots of it, and there was definitely enough of it over this past year.

Then, I also faced the ugly reality that is the trap of aging with my grandmother and my grandfather. I came to a point where I finally had to throw up my hands and admit to alcoholism. I walked away from my main social circle in order to hermit myself away from almost ten years of habitual living to quit drinking. Basically, 2010 had me me quaking in my metaphorical boots about mortality and the brevity of life while turning myself inside out both habit-wise and socially.

I had to think and feel and do things that were hard for me to think and feel and do, and I felt like I was pulling out my own teeth a lot of the time. Somehow, though, this turned 2010 into one of the best years of my life. It really did.

There is a lot of positive-thinking noise about learning how to say Yes! to things in your life, but saying Yes! is often best done by judiciously and sometimes painfully say No!, and 2010 was the year in which I said No! a lot every day so that I had the ability to say Yes! in other areas.

Some Pollyanna out there is going to pop up and try to tell me that all those No!s were really Yes!ses in disguise, and to that person I say Screw you. Those No!s were No!s, and I know, because they were hard and awful and dragged me through the mud face down, and that mud had rocks in it, and it was rainy, and it was cold, too, and I had a really shitty time of it. I love those No!s, though. I claim them. They made me.

Anyway, I was lying in bed this morning reflecting on the mindfuck that was 2010 and wondering what it meant that I pretty much just walked away from a whole life, and what it meant for me that I once left a fiancee and did all kinds of drugs and had a doomed love affair and suffered life in the closet and was diagnosed with all manner of psychological illnesses in the 1990s and became an alcoholic and quit my office job for no job and had cancer and on and on and on as all the crazy stuff life throws at a person is wont to just keep happening.

{By Tanis from Attack of the Redneck Mommy}

My child recently had to write an essay about the hardest thing he ever had to do. For him, it seems to be trying to keep his damn room clean. It’s mission impossible for a twelve year old sloth I tell you.

But this essay inspired a conversation between us that I have long since been thinking about. He asked me what the hardest thing I ever had to do was.

I didn’t know how to answer him.

What does hard really mean? Gestating and giving birth to three rabid badgers who tore my insides out was hard.

Coming home with a disabled baby no one expected or prepared for was hard.

Trying to explain to people why my beautiful son never smiled was hard.

Spending endless nights, months on end, staring at a boy in a crib in a hospital and wondering if my family would ever be whole and under one roof together was hard. Dealing with one doctor after another in a never ending series of medical emergencies was hard.

Missing field trips and precious moments with my older two children because I had to be with their younger sibling was hard.

Driving alone, in the middle of the night, with a dying child in the back seat of my car was hard.

Looking into my husband’s eyes when he arrived at the hospital and having to find the words to tell him I failed him and our son, was hard. Phoning our family to tell them our boy had died, was hard.

Walking out of the emergency room with nothing but a plastic bag of a dead boy’s belongings was hard.

Mustering up the courage to walk into my childrens rooms, sit them down as their father stood behind me weeping, to tell them their brother died in the middle of the night and they would never have another opportunity to hug him was hard.

Seeing the mound of dirt heaped upon where my boy’s body lie and having to walk away from that boy for the last time, was hard.

Hard doesn’t seem adequate enough.